


CHOICELESS HOPE

by mayleavestars



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Study, Dream Bubbles (Homestuck), Eventual Happy Ending, F/F, Fix-It of Sorts, Illustrated, Metafiction, Mobile-friendly, Not Canon Compliant - The Homestuck Epilogues, Other Character Tags to be Added - Freeform, Post-Canon, Relationship Study, fanadventure, tag wranglers if you're reading this give june her own damn ao3 tag
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-16
Updated: 2021-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-10 16:40:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 18,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28100313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayleavestars/pseuds/mayleavestars
Summary: Your name is TEREZI PYROPE.You have been searching the depths of the FURTHEST RING for CHILDHOOD BEST FRIEND, PRETEENHOOD NEMESIS, TEEN SWEETDIAMOND, and POSSIBLE LOVE OF YOUR LIFE, VRISKA SERKET, for what may or may not have been THREE MONTHS.-Near the start of her search for Vriska, Terezi is offered a choice.
Relationships: Terezi Pyrope/Vriska Serket
Comments: 29
Kudos: 90





	1. PROLOGUE

The Furthest Ring collapses. 

Dream bubbles crack and fall apart; the constructs that have sustained imitations of life past their points of relevance break beneath the dueling forces of time and space. Ghosts die in droves. It is not so different from the mass destruction of reality that had proliferated through the Furthest Ring all the way through your journey through it.

Certain dubiously illustrious figures within this narrative would tell you, at certain points in their multiple lives, that what you are watching is the destruction of fiction rather than reality. There would be a note of panic in their voices. 

As far as you’re concerned, though, that black hole looks pretty fucking real.

At the center, the light of what was once the Green Sun wavers, sputters, and spirals away. A story is dying. It will hang in its moment of death for as long as there are people to watch it fall apart. 

So dream bubbles pop one by one and the ghosts that opposed Lord English spiral to their double-deaths. And at a safe distance from the strange black hole that swallows the space between universes, you watch.

CHOICELESS HOPE.

OR, AN EPIC ~~VRISCOURSE~~  
~~ Terezicourse!!!!!!!! ~~  
VRISREZICOURSE KATABASIS* ADVENTURE

*But only sort of.

Your name is TEREZI PYROPE.

You have been searching the depths of the FURTHEST RING for CHILDHOOD BEST FRIEND, PRETEENHOOD NEMESIS, TEEN SWEETDIAMOND, and POSSIBLE LOVE OF YOUR LIFE, VRISKA SERKET, for what may or may not have been THREE MONTHS. You left shortly before turning eight sweeps, near what would have been your SEVENTEENTH BIRTHDAY if you measured time the way certain LOSERS in your acquaintance do.

Your palmhusk has just pinged to announce a message that you are almost positive you do not want to read. The chatlog, as it stands, had not been promising. 

You recall your most recent conversation with a certain characteristic pain in the ass.

EB: so, like...  
EB: in the furthest ring, i guess you can come back to the same place at different times?  
GC: Y3S  
GC: YOU WOULD TH1NK TH4T S33R POW3RS WOULD B3 US3FUL H3R3  
GC: TH3Y 4R3 NOT!  
GC: 1T 1S UNFORTUN4T3  
EB: terezi, what are you going to do if you don’t find her? 

At that point, you conveniently disappeared. This is an advantage of indefinitely floating through the void! There is no telling when you might disappear. If you don’t respond to questions you don’t want to answer, that’s not your fault: it’s just the bizarre machinations of timespace.

EB: are you doing okay? it’s been months.  
GC: R34LLY?   
GC: TH4T’S SO FUCK3D UP  
GC: SORRY, YOU KNOW HOW 1T 1S  
GC: WH4T W1TH TH3 B1Z4RR3 M4CH1N4T1ONS OF T1M3SP4C3  
EB: they are stubborn machinations.  
GC: W3LL, 1’M AL1V3  
GC: JUST C4N’T 3X4CTLY 4NSW3R T3XTS ON T1M3  
GC: W4S TH4T 4LL YOU W4NT3D?  
EB: well, no, not really.  
EB: it would be cool if you could answer my question or stop hanging out on the edges of black holes!   
EB: but i’m not sure if i can expect that from you seeing as those sound like the actions of someone who’s not a HUGE LOSER.

There are things you could say to that. 

There are ways to explain that, as far as you personally understand it, you have returned to the same location at a hundred different points in a universe-rending battle’s development. There are ways to explain that you cannot stop ‘hanging out at the edges of black holes’ because if your conjectures about the battle with Lord English are correct, this is the only place in the entire Furthest Ring that you know Vriska has visited. 

There are ways to begin to say that you do not know how much time has passed. Jade Harley had talked to you once about perceptual time, the way that hours can feel like minutes or days. You are good at not feeling unsettled by the strange – you are strange yourself, and always have been. But it's unsettling all the same that the numbers that mark time on your palmhusk stand still, and the only way that you yourself can measure time is the amount of time you think has passed at any given moment; a thing that is never constant. Your perception of time is at once the only version of time that exists here, and not. Time can still run out here. The black hole confirms this.

There are ways to begin attempting an articulation of the way you feel when you hold your glasses before the wreckage, taste their surface, and pick apart every ghost you’ve seen tumble into place you are not yet willing to follow them into, on the wait at all times for one of them to be – 

There are also ways to dodge the entire conversation and respond to whatever entry-level blackflirting John is apparently trying for at the end there.

GC: 3GB3RT ON3 D4Y YOU W1LL F1ND OUT TH3Y H4VE HARSH3R COM3B4CKS TH4N ‘HUG3 LOS3R’ NOW  
GC: 4ND TH3N 1 W1LL B3 SO PROUD OF YOU >:]  
EB: “bluh bluh i am terezi i am so mean and scary!”  
EB: “i have never heard of being nice to my friends, it’s not like i’m in space searching for a friend right now!”   
GC: OH SH1T   
GC: H4V3 1 JUST B33N OWN3D?  
EB: you tell me!  
GC: 1 4M F4R FROM OWN3D  
GC: K33P TRY1NG THOUGH  
GC: M4YB3 YOU’LL G3T SOM3WH3R3 N3XT T1M3!  
EB: are you leaving already?  
GC: W3LL  
GC: 1 DO TH1NK 1’V3 H4D 3NOUGH OF LOOK1NG 4T TH1S BL4CK HOL3

If you get a text back, you do not know what it is. It is probably unfair to treat everyone at home this way. You have not been known to be fair for a long time. 

You leave the wreck of the battle behind you.

It is safer here. 

Further from where the Green Sun once was, the Furthest Ring is made of spreading cracks and disintegrating dream bubbles. Your nose is hit with an intense wave of their iridescent mishmash of colors, and –

– And you remember sitting on the observation deck with Vriska, holding hands as the darkness above you broke apart and bled light; in a space between two universes, not minding a three-year removal from the action, not minding being frozen in time, not minding it at all –

– And you remember Remem8ering, and all of the timelines in which you watched the dream bubbles, still, but watched them alone –

You are pulling out your palmhusk and pulling up the last messages you sent to her – a wall of teal, unbroken by the entry of her color – before you know you've done it. You barely need to smell or taste the words, of course. You remember your fumbling attempts at truth perfectly well.

But that was then, and this is now. Now you put away the palmhusk, try not to revisit the absence of a response, and sniff at the dream bubbles' slow-paced process of unraveling. The intact refuges of Feferi's afterlife thin out moment by moment; this, at least, is linear, even if nothing else is. Slowly, it is all being pulled toward the wreckage you’ve left behind you. 

It is likely that Vriska – 

You don’t know how much time you have left. You doubt it can be measured in time at all, perceptual or genuine or otherwise. 

There were ghosts here, once. You’d spoken to a few of them, even. Now there is only – huh. 

Now there is only a whiff of…

TEREZI: 4R4D14?  
TEREZI: 1 D1DN’T KNOW YOU W3R3 ST1LL H3R3  
ARADIA: not for long, but i am for a bit!  
ARADIA: though from your perspective this does not make even a bit of difference.  
ARADIA: im making my rounds before i hop in there :D

You think you might have an idea of what ‘there’ is.

TEREZI: 1F 1 THOUGHT YOU W3R3 B4TSH1T CR4ZY   
TEREZI: 1 WOULD S4Y YOU M34NT TH3 BL4CK HOL3  
ARADIA: bingo!   
ARADIA: how long have you thought i was batshit, incidentally?  
TEREZI: W3LL W3’R3 BOTH H3R3 AR3N’T W3  
TEREZI: 1 4LW4YS THOUGHT TH4T B31NG B4TSH1T SU1T3D YOU  
TEREZI: BUT TH1S 1S –  
TEREZI: UNL1K3 YOU.  
TEREZI: 1 THOUGHT YOUR WHOL3 TH1NG NOW W4S, L1K3  
TEREZI: B31NG V3RY MUCH 4L1V3  
TEREZI: 4ND 1NTEND1NG TO ST4Y TH4T WAY?  
ARADIA: yeah!  
ARADIA: you really think this is a *normal* universe-destroying black hole, terezi?  
ARADIA: theres something on the other end!  
ARADIA: and every way in has a way out!

TEREZI: SO -   
TEREZI: 1 THOUGHT 4LL TH1S T1M3, P3OPL3 F4LL 1N TH3R3 4ND TH3Y D13 4ND TH4T’S 1T.  
ARADIA: well most of them are already dead  
ARADIA: i dont know what happens to them in there!  
ARADIA: that would be a very interesting thing to find out 0u0  
ARADIA: but i dont think it would be a good way to find her.  
ARADIA: im sorry  
TEREZI: NO, 1TS NOT –  
TEREZI: YOU TH1NK 1’M STUP1D  
TEREZI: JOHN 4ND K4RK4T 4ND TH3 OTH3RS, TH3Y 4LL TH1NK 1 –  
ARADIA: i dont really think anything about your quest  
ARADIA: thats not intended as rude! im just saying i dont have a strong personal investment in it. i want you and vriska to be happy, if that helps!   
ARADIA: if you think its the right thing to do then you should keep going. a variety of interesting things could happen either way.  
ARADIA: but im actually here to show you something  
ARADIA: theres an intact dream bubble here, just follow me

TEREZI: 1 D1DN’T KNOW TH3R3 W3R3 4NY DR34M BUBBL3S L3FT  
ARADIA: they’re almost gone! theres just a few :)  
ARADIA: like i said, this is my last go-around  
ARADIA: sollux is hanging out around here somewhere but i wanted to see you  
ARADIA: i guess i thought itd be an ok way to say goodbye for now if im leaving the furthest ring  
TEREZI: WH4T 1NT3R3ST1NG TH1NG 4RE W3 T4LK1NG H3R3   
TEREZI: 1S TH1S…  
ARADIA: will it help you find her?   
TEREZI: 1 W4SN’T GO1NG TO S4Y TH4T  
TEREZI: TH4T WOULD B3 4 PR3TTY FUCK3D UP COND1T1ON TO H4ND OUT 1F 1 W4S SP3ND1NG T1M3 W1TH 4 FR13ND 1 MIGHT N3V3R S33 4G41N  
ARADIA: its okay terezi! it would be weird if you didnt wonder   
ARADIA: and the answer is...  
ARADIA: maybe!  
TEREZI: 1T’S FUNNY TH4T YOU’V3 B33N 4N 3XTR3M3LY V4R14BL3 S3T OF P3OPL3  
TEREZI: 4ND NOT ONC3 H4V3 YOU NOT B33N CRYPT1C  
ARADIA: cryptic is the just about sexiest thing a god of time can be ;)  
ARADIA: come on, though, it’s right up front.

When you’ve broken through the membrane of the dream bubble and she’s led you into the opulent pink-hued room, crowded with the sounds of people-memories you know aren’t really there.

The room definitely smells like trolls; it is also not a multi-troll environment you have ever been able to imagine. They are too unafraid; or the wrong kind of afraid, at any rate.

TEREZI: TH1S 1SN’T 4LT3RN14, OR 34RTH  
TEREZI: SO TH3N 1T MUST B3 B3FORUS  
ARADIA: yes  
ARADIA: the other feferi fancied herself quite a patron of arts!   
ARADIA: and we are gearing up for some music  
TEREZI: WH4T K1ND?   
ARADIA: well, thats up to you, isn’t it? 

ARADIA: it is the choice, so to speak, between a ballad and an epic  
ARADIA: or to put it more literally, between a song and a symphony.  
ARADIA: which, time-wise, is a pretty important choice.  
ARADIA: how long will the performance last?  
ARADIA: how many directions can it take?  
ARADIA: and, of course,  
ARADIA: do we know how it will end? 

Directions of meaning and consequence have always come far more naturally to you than they would to, hypothetically, other people in other settings, making other seemingly-mundane choices.

The consequences of such choices had once been a manner of simple navigation.

TEREZI: 4 SYMPHONY 3XT3NDS YOUR 3XP3R13NC3  
TEREZI: 4N 3XT3NS1ON OF T1M3 M34NS YOU C4N B3 L3SS SUR3 WH4T H4PP3NS 4T TH3 3ND  
TEREZI: WH1CH C4N B3 N1C3 1F YOU'R3 SC4R3D OF TH3 3ND  
TEREZI: 1F YOU WOULD R4TH3R 3XT3ND TH3 3XP3R13NC3 TH4T PR3C3D3S 1T!  
TEREZI: PROGR3SS 1N TH4T 1ND3F1N1T3 SP4C3, OR 3V3N ST4GN4T3 R34LLY  
TEREZI: B3CAUS3 SOM3T1M3S 3ND1NGS 4R3 TH1NGS YOU DON’T KNOW HOW TO L1V3 W1TH  
TEREZI: 4ND 1F 1T'S 4N 3ND YOU DO L1K3, TH3 PR3SUMPT1ON 1S TH4T 4 LONG3R JOURN3Y M4K3S 1T MOR3 S4T1SFY1NG  
TEREZI: BUT TH3 R34L TRUTH 1S  
TEREZI: 1T G1V3S YOU T1M3 TO PR3P4R3  
ARADIA: yes!   
TEREZI: ON TH3 OTH3R H4ND, 1F YOU'R3 SOM3ON3 WHO 1S V3RY T1R3D,   
TEREZI: TOO T1R3D, 1N TH1S C4S3, TO S1T THROUGH 4N 3NT1R3 SHOW  
TEREZI: OR 4T L34ST SOM3ON3 WHO KNOWS TH4T TH3Y H4V3 TH3 C4P4C1TY TO GROW T1R3D  
TEREZI: M1GHT 4LR34DY F33L TH4T T1R3DN3SS S3TTL1NG 1NTO TH3M  
TEREZI: TH3 SONG M1GHT B3 TH3 4PP34L1NG THOUGHT  
ARADIA: you are quite good at gathering the underlying metatextual conditions of apparently meaningless choices  
ARADIA: you might have made a pretty great time player! 0u0  
TEREZI: T3LL M3 SOM3TH1NG 1 DON’T KNOW >:]  
ARADIA: so which one is it, terezi?   
ARADIA: song, or symphony? 

Song or symphony, Terezi. Song or symphony.

You See –

There is a world in which you feel your youth acutely, and Earth C pushes you away like the wrong end of a magnet. There is a world in which you look down the longer path and know the dissolution it contains, the near-oblivion. Years of wandering in the empty dark, and the great painful unknown that follows.

There is a Vriska in both timelines, you think. In both, there are things that go wrong for the both of you. But it has only been a year (or a few months, or a few days, or hours) and an ambivalent future in emptiness sounds better, suddenly, than returning to Earth C so soon after you left, than getting her back and having to risk being unhappy anyway. 

The urge to hover in unresolved narrative, to hide yourself, tempts you more than it tempts the other you, the one that looks down the path of oblivion, the path of falling into darkness and clawing up from it, and, for once in her life, flinches away.

Neither of you see the full picture. But that’s quite standard, isn’t it? It has always been this way. 

[You pick the symphony](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGj-hDDFktI), 

… near-impossible to play, but possible all the same. It might be this one. It might be another, one that hasn’t been written yet, one that is equally unfamiliar to a hypothetical audience as it is to you.

You and Aradia sit in the hall, and the music washes over you. It is not the first great convergence of interlocking voices you have witnessed or participated in.

The symphony ends, but it is nice to be able to sit still for longer and listen as it plays out; it is nice to get to wait; it's nice to get to observe. “I should go,” you tell her at the end, and she nods quietly. Stands up.

Without warning, Aradia throws her arms around you. Her body is so warm; you haven’t touched, you think, since you were five sweeps each and playing Flarp. You will think, later, that you should have let yourself hold on longer. She will be the last person you touch in a very, very long time.

For the length of the journey that follows, you will forget that there was a time when you were not tired. In an unknown future, unknown even to you, you might be a hero or a villain, (or neither, or both). You might see Vriska again; there’s a million ways you might, and a million that you might not. In every timeline, it’s at the cost of much.

Somewhere, in the darkness of Paradox Space, the notes of a discordant, unresolved symphony, ever-present if not all-defining, will begin.

[ **== >** ](https://www.homestuck.com/epilogues)

– But there is a world (this one) where you look down one long, dark corridor and then down another, shorter, brightly-lit corridor and take your chances with the edge of an ending (as little as you’re finding you believe in the concept of endings or their ‘happiness,’ whether or not it’s offered to you through strange metatextual riddles).

There is a world where, as frightened as you are of the future, of losing and going back empty-handed, or worse, of winning and finding that an abstract end goal can become a reality you’re not ready for, you take your chances with it either way.

TEREZI: L3T’S H4V3 TH3 SONG, TH3N. 

[==>](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28100313/chapters/69131784)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wow. Next Big Project, finally commenced!
> 
> i am very attached to this... fanfic? fanadventure? illustrated fanfic? picture book? whatever this is. i can promise it is outlined, has a set scope, and will be finished! i cannot promise consistent updates because i am a full-time college student and drawing is hard. but i should get at least one other chapter out before my winter break ends in late january! 
> 
> this work is not compliant with the homestuck epilogues (you might have guessed this if you've read the chapter), but does assume an approximate audience knowledge of what happens in them. 
> 
> also, the title is from "talk" by hozier because apparently i can't stop titling my fucking vrisrezi longfic over beardguy music. everyone has flaws, okay? 
> 
> finally, i'm on twitter at [chronotopics](https://twitter.com/chronotopics)!


	2. CHAPTER I: THIEF

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Terezi hears a song, lands in a battle, and acquires reluctant aid.

Your name is Terezi Pyrope, and last time we saw you, you made a choice.

TEREZI: L3T’S H4V3 TH3 SONG, TH3N.  


[You hear the song.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8mLKTY5TWM)

It is not a song you have ever heard before in your life, but it’s a familiar song all the same – or feels like one, has tricked you into being one – here, at the end of all things. 

It only lasts four minutes or so. Time in the Furthest Ring feels more tangible with Aradia sitting beside you, her eyes closed carefully at the sound of the soaring ghost-notes that have come alive in the long-gone hall around you. There’s an underlying beat like walking, like a journey; there’s a soaring like hope. 

As the notes fade out and the song ends, you are remembering the endings that carry proper finality rather than deferring it indefinitely; endings like another you finding another Vriska in a dream bubble, and watching the universe fall apart around you. 

You wonder if you’d take that, given the chance; finality followed by discontinuation. To see her again, only to be blasted apart where you stand, or dragged away into the oblivion of the black hole you’ve been helplessly watching for weeks. 

Then, maybe it’s the song that still echoes in your head, or maybe the presence of Aradia, calm and ancient and very much alive, but you realize something that shouldn’t be unsettling, but might be all the same. 

At this moment in time, you do not want to die. 

Aradia has guided ghosts through their deaths. She has guided your planet to its destruction, and your session to its needed victory state. She has lived a thousand timelines, and ushered in a thousand ends what were not her own. 

It is not an end you’ve come to seek here, you think. It is an escape, maybe; but with sudden conviction you do not want your search to be a search for death, nor of indefinite floating, nor of a life of unhappiness. An extensive, indefinite deferment.

Aradia eschews the end, but she guides others towards it; to each an end of their own. If timelines tangle inside you, they halo her neatly, tucked away into a rhythmic perpetual motion. 

She can end this. 

There is a way for her to end this.

TEREZI: 4R4D14  
TEREZI: 1 TH1NK 1 N33D YOUR H3LP  


It is unusual for you to ask favors of people. By default, you are someone who enacts what she must enact alone or not at all. By default, also, you will remain here for the next few years of your life. 

By default, who fucking knows what will happen to Vriska. 

You steel yourself. Asking help from her is at once more and less than asking a regular troll. She is a childhood best friend, a principled, outspoken FLARPer who liked exploring ruins and digging in the dirt, and didn’t defer to highbloods. She is also an ancient goddess of time. Somehow, these two factors make it possible for you to say the right words.

TEREZI: 1 N33D YOU TO T4K3 M3 TO H3R  
ARADIA: to vriska?  
ARADIA: i dont know where she is!  
ARADIA: well i have a feeling but  
ARADIA: you wont like it  
TEREZI: 1’M NOT T4LK1NG 4BOUT WH3R3  
TEREZI: 1’M T4LK1NG 4BOUT WH3N  


Her eyes widen. In this way, she is a cryptic kind of god. Surely the idea could have occurred to her, but it is not within her nature, you think, to offer help of her own free will. It must be sought. 

Embarrassing, but necessary. You must ride this wave of motivation to seek aid so long as it exists. 

ARADIA: oh!  
ARADIA: yeah i can do that  
ARADIA: im not going to deny someone the chance to get a look at a story-ending battle  
ARADIA: that would just be unfair!  
TEREZI: 1 DON’T 3X4CTLY 1NT3ND ON JUST W4TCH1NG  
ARADIA: yeah i figured   
ARADIA: which will make the whole thing a lot more interesting :)   
ARADIA: just follow me!   


Aradia leads you out of the hall and to the edge of the dream bubble; the same place you remember entering it for the first time. 

Apparently by “follow me,” she meant, ‘stand back, I'm breaking time open.” Before you know it, she has reached towards the membrane of the Dream Bubble, speculated a little - her eyes close, you imagine, lashes touching her soft cheeks, then break wide open – her mouth breaks into a smile –

With a sound like a rip and a pop, the walls of the bubble come apart where she’s parted them. Then there are sounds coming from outside the gap in the bubble, and your nose is hit with the familiar scent of green.

ARADIA: there it is! you just have to look for the right exit from everywhere and it will all work itself out  
TEREZI: WOW

Even the indication of admiration sounds strange in your mouth, but not so strange as you have expected. Ironic that you are closer to something passably normal here, at the end of the world, than back in paradise with the others.

Aradia fixes you with her ever-present grin.

ARADIA: ask me how i knew  
TEREZI: S1GH  
ARADIA: :)  
TEREZI: HOW D1D YOU KNOW  
ARADIA: i am  
ARADIA: …  
ARADIA: …   
TEREZI: 1 4M B31NG SO N1C3 TO YOU R1GHT NOW  
ARADIA: …   
ARADIA: …   
ARADIA: …   
TEREZI: B3C4US3 YOU 4R3 H3LP1NG M3  
TEREZI: 4ND ONLY FOR TH4T R34SON  
ARADIA: …   
ARADIA: made of time!   
TEREZI: TH4NKS FOR TH4T!  


You elbow in front of her and walk towards the gap in the dream bubble. The sound of double-death echoes from outside. Acrid green, mixed with the multicolored spider web cracks forming the Furthest Ring’s destruction, sounds out across the space. A blood-red stone surface and an army of ghosts, the ghosts you have been watching die. You're too far away to make out any specific figures.

You remember yourself and turn back to Aradia.

TEREZI: UH  
TEREZI: TH4NKS 1N G3N3R4L, 4CTU4LLY  
TEREZI: 1’LL M1SS YOU?

She turns around and throws her arms around you. 

ARADIA: ill miss you too terezi  
ARADIA: though im sure well see each other again  
ARADIA: some you and some me, anyway :D  
TEREZI: Y34H  
TEREZI: 1 HOP3

When she lets go of you, you step out into the darkness of the Furthest Ring. After holding her, it is very cold.

You’re at too far a distance to make it out clearly. Cracks in the fabric of the sky, you can see that. A red rock plane; a bright green blur. A sea of ghosts.

You take your glasses off and give them a lick. It takes a moment for the scene to focus.

The same orange expanse. A sea of figures ready to, for some godforsaken reason, throw themselves at a being that can destroy them with a mere glance. A sound of many people moving at once that you’re too up high, too far away to notice. 

A figure at the front whose identity you don’t need to verify via the color of her jacket. 

You are brushing with a moment that holds something else – something important – together. You can almost imagine the harsher notes of a symphony you’ve only heard snatches of in dreams and visions. The scene has the same visceral vividness as the ones you have brushed with in your glimpses of the other timeline. 

You fly closer, enough that you are able to make her out when the shining geometric object – shaped like a hive, you think, a human hive – crashes down onto the ground behind her. 

You don’t know what it is that makes her look away from where she’s gazing at the monster before her with her hands on her hips, but for a moment you think she does. For a moment, you think she is looking at you.

Then Lord English lets out a reality-splitting roar and the already disintegrating world breaks apart altogether.

For a moment there are no senses, nothing except for the enormity of the sound. New cracks appear over the old ones; shards of darkness begin to unstick from the sky. You see none of this; instead you are sent flying backward, away from the battle.

Your ears are ringing when, miraculously stationary, you manage to sniff up at the new web of cracks that has embedded itself in the Furthest Ring. At the center of that blue glow, you think, is an undercurrent of unsettling, tasteless white.

You have seen this scene before; not its present, but its aftermath. Reality has begun to collapse, but there’s a piece missing. Any moment now –

You know what comes next; you are diving down towards the battle, somehow sure that the company of Lord English and the ghost army is safer than – 

You can smell it, then, without even turning your face toward it. The black hole opens slowly, stretches out high above the scene of the battle. The shards of reality you have watched spiral into it one by one come unstuck from their places and begin the inexorable movement you have watched for months. 

You know well enough that this is an influence you must escape, but even as you take in the scene through short, desperate breaths, the flat red-rock plane on which the battle has taken place begins to fall apart. 

Is Vriska still in front of Lord English? In the screams that a dying reality unleashes over the space of the Furthest Ring, in the starting points of a destruction that will echo over an enormous, uncertain span of time, you have lost track of her altogether.

It’s hard to focus long enough to look at her; all of your effort is diverted to avoiding the wicked, quick sharpness of the hurtling reality-shards, to distancing yourself from the black hole as fast as possible. 

Still, once you’ve landed on the surface of the rock, you are able to find her fast.

The scent of cerulean is not hard to miss.

She is on her knees, leaning on her sword. Even as you run towards her, the call of the black hole above you both intensifies. An empty hum in the air. A resonation across universes. 

Vriska is pulled to a standing position, staggering; you think her gaze is on you, but you can’t be sure. You see her feet leave the ground; maybe it’s that the pull is stronger where she is, or maybe there is some kind of narrative force exerting influence onto her disproportionately. 

You can almost hear it, you think. If you tuned in, you would. A voice, whispering how it should be going. 

You did not hear this song for nothing. You did not ask Aradia’s help for nothing. 

You shake away the half-heard words and take a running start. 

If you're reading this, you successfully made an effort at reading my transparent section because you're that desperate to know what I'm saying at all times. What are you, some kind of 'Dirk stan'? Pathetic, if expected. I have many admirers. Anyway, would you check this shit out? We've got fucking Terezis now? We've got Terezis in this vital canon-preservation scene. I can’t look away from you people for a goddamn minute. Terezi, this is just about the exact opposite of where you need to be right now. You are suddenly realizing that you want to let her fade into irrelevance. You want this one-off gimmick of a controversy magnet, this self-absorbed attention hog who does not give two shits about you aside from the discourse you've helped generate about her – to fuck right off and go back to the special thing she and I were doing together. The thing where she falls into the black hole and you do not for the love of canon let yourself divert this entire fucking story. You want to go right back to canon and go – what, fuck John Egbert? Seriously, is that what you’re doing? Suits me fine, actually. What two consenting adults do in the back of – whatever, not my fucking area. Regardless, can we put a stop to this? This, the thing you’re doing right now? I promise that no matter how hard you try to believe otherwise, it’s not going to lead you anywhere good. Nostalgia makes idiots of the best of us, but it’s worth understanding that the kinds of people we’re dealing with here are at no point capable of returning this kind of pathetic devotion in any kind of adequate capacity. I know you get this. Come on.

Vriska’s body is familiar where it collides with yours. It is bizarre that here, in the midst of everything, you are able to determine the heat of a battle, that the temperature gap between your bodies has not changed; she is still just a shade colder than you, and the gasp she makes as you collide with her – in escaping the black hole, you have not been able to mind her shoulder – is the same, it is her voice, she is speaking in a voice wracked with pain –

VRISKA: Terezi,  
VRISKA: What the FUCK are you doing he–  


The pull is still exerting itself upon you, but you are focused on getting down and out of the way - you have to, there is a time limit unleashing here that even you don’t fully –

TEREZI: MR ORANG3 CR34MS1CL3  
TEREZI: ANNOY1NG OR4NG3 T3XT BRO  
TEREZI: 1 DON’T KNOW WHO YOU 4R3 BUT C4N YOU PL34S3 SHUT TH3 FUCK UP

The voice is audible over the noise of the battle. Even distanced, even in your dive to get away from the battle and the black hole’s pull, the noise should overwhelm you, but it doesn’t. Instead, the distinctly orange drawl – on the edge of collected and concerned – booms in your fucking ears.

It’s funny because you don’t know just how apt that address was.

TEREZI: >:?  
TEREZI: MR ORANG3 CR34MS1CL3?

No, not th– 

You know what, never mind.

TEREZI: 1 KNOW YOU!  
TEREZI: YOU’R3 D4V3’S L3SS COOL BROTH3R  
TEREZI: TH3 ON3 W1TH TH3 MIX3D B3RRY P4NT4LOONS

Always nice to meet a fan. You can hear me. Great. Fuck it, why not. Stupider things have happened. It might make this part easier. Unlike that cargo of yours, you’re pretty capable of listening to reason. 

Terezi, I am asking you nicely not to do this. And that’s not a thing I’ve done much of for people. I’m extending you a sought-after fuckin’ courtesy. 

TEREZI: D1D YOU KNOW YOUR T3XT 1S B4R3LY R34D4BL3  
TEREZI: H4V3 YOU N3V3R H34RD OF 4 W3B 4CC3SS1B1L1TY GU1D3LINE

You’re fucking baiting me. Cute. Nice routine, it definitely didn't wear out at age thirteen. Are you aware you’re trapping everyone you care about in a fucking Alternate Universe – Canon Divergence? Just for a second, I am asking for you to figure out exactly what that means. It’s not too late to turn back. I can’t say you’re central to the plan, but you make a nice addition to it. 

TEREZI: 4R3 YOU 4W4R3 YOU W3R3 CHUCK1NG VR1SK4 1N 4 BL4CK HOL3  
TEREZI: 1 DON’T KNOW WH4T 4 C4NON D1V3RG3NC3 1S 4ND TO B3 FR4NK 1 DON’T C4R3  
TEREZI: BUT 1M PR3TTY SUR3 1 KNOW WH4T 4 BL4CK HOL3 1S

Man-to-troll honesty, Terezi. You think you want this right now. You think you want to settle down in an irrelevant little reality with someone you think gives just as much of a shit about you as you do about them. And that’s understandable. That’s somewhere I was once, too. Just shut down my brain and let myself be stupid enough for a few years to think that was even a fucking option.

TEREZI: 4R3 YOU 4LW4YS TH1S 4NNOY1NG WH3N YOU MONOLOGU3

You will yourself not to listen. You will yourself to smell and taste and hear anything but a sea of self-absorbed orange with the biggest, most incomprehensible chip on its shoulder you’ve ever seen.

Over and over, you remind yourself. You picked the song. You picked the song!

A familiar soapy iridescence looms up ahead of you. You don’t need to smell the space behind you to know that it comprises Lord English, the black hole that consumes the Furthest Ring, and apparently the disembodied and very bitter voice of Dave’s brother expounding on things you only have the faintest understandings of. In other words, you are out of options.

You readjust your grip on Vriska and fly towards the dream bubble with the last strength you have left.

Its pliable surface gives a bit, then closes around you, and for a moment all you smell and taste is the familiar colors, strangely intact.

It’s not like falling. There is no path downwards, there is only entering and landing; slammed down to earth not physically but by way of changed scenery, a landscape’s frantic attempt to integrate you into its memory-environment.

It disorients you for a time, all the same.

When you come to, soft sand surrounds you, and under the ringing of your ears you can hear what could be the soft sound of the ocean. Your glasses are absent from the bridge of your nose; you must have fallen after all, must have spent some time diving down into the sand, because they are nowhere near you.

You sit up.

The Earth sky, scattered with the stars that twelve trolls put there untold sweeps ago, fades upwards into the surface of the dream bubble, through which you can still make out the cracks in the Furthest Ring. It’s not so different from the dream bubbles you ended up in on the meteor.

For a moment it could be the meteor, just another dream bubble you and Vriska have found for yourselves. You think you’ve even seen this one before – Jade Harley’s island in the middle of the Earth ocean.

Though it could be an Alternian ocean, even, the stretch of dark water near Vriska’s house, if you ignored the absence of the moons and reconfigured the glow of the stars. That’s a game you’ve been playing for a while, now.

The aftereffects of the eye-searing glow of the disintegrating Furthest Ring make it hard to make out what’s around you. Still, after taking a moment to gulp desperate gasps of salt sea air, you turn to face Vriska.

Time to breathe should be good, and yet time to breathe is far from it when it gives you time to examine her properly. Her right eye is all but gone, right shoulder in bad shape. It is as if the shards of reality that have unleashed themselves into her were playing some kind of unpleasant practical joke.

You don’t think it is your fault this time, not directly. It still feels like it is.

For making her look up at the right second, for pulling her away from the battle at the wrong time, for coming here in the first place, for choosing this timeline.

Songs end quickly. Nobody specified happily.

You feel like an idiot. Just as much of one as Orange Strider said you were, if for entirely different reasons.

You reach out and touch her, as if afraid even her half-dead body might disappear. She is certainly real. It is her solidity; her blue-tinged skin, one shade cooler than yours. Her sharp bones beneath your hand, which lingers on her face.

She is breathing.

You don’t know how long she'll stay that way. 

It is anything but the time to rediscover the familiar feeling of crushing despair. In your place, Vriska would get up; Vriska would find her way back to the Door, wherever that is at this point; Vriska would inspire you to shake off your injuries, would pull out a last-minute resource that saved everybody at the last minute.

You are Terezi Pyrope, and you are so tired you could die. Three months in the Furthest Ring, in hindsight, suddenly feel like years. In some other universe, how did you resign yourself to an indefinite length in this cold, empty place?

To get her back. To defer your own need to confront your eternal inadequacy, too, but most of all to get her back, right? For a search and a purpose; to keep the only guiding light you ever had; but also to get her back.

What did you do to lose her now, after thinking you had the right to escape indefinite emptiness? After thinking you had the right to want to live, for two fucking seconds?

You want to move, and you are scared you might not be able to; your legs are weak. In the aftermath of ripping through several narrative forces at once, shock appears to be settling in.

The familiarity of the void’s persistent appeal is crawling back, too.

The night sky, built of life and memory, stays placid above you. You are sure Jade thought it beautiful on the days that she was not sick of seeing it.

You squeeze Vriska’s hand where you’ve been holding it absentmindedly. It’s cold, but not death-cold. Not yet. In a voice that suddenly registers to you as hoarse from disuse, you speak.

TEREZI: VR1SK4  
TEREZI: 1F YOU C4N H34R M3  
TEREZI: 1’M SORRY

You think that you are owed, at least, enough resolution for an answer, and so your hand shakes in her stubbornly still one, and so you feel anger surface when she is silent.

Then a voice answers. But it’s not hers.

ROSE: My goodness.  
ROSE: We have alive ones.

TEREZI: L4LOND3  
TEREZI: 4ND –  
TEREZI: MR. L3MON DROP W1TH TH3 L3GS  
TEREZI: BUT D34D  
JAKE: Not the worst thing ive ever been called.  
JAKE: True on all accounts too i DO have legs though id rather you not look at them for too long.  
ROSE: Hmmm.  
ROSE: Terezi, right?  
ROSE: You look appropriately baffled. And quite miserable, too.  
ROSE: Would you join us?  


A fire is built, or maybe just manifests. Dream bubble mechanics; these moments pass like dreams, just as advertised. There is no time to say my best friend is bleeding to death right in front of you two. They’re dead themselves, after all; who knows if they’ve noticed?

ROSE: I have always wanted to try my hand at being a spirit guide.  
ROSE: That is to say, not always. I once wanted other things, like being alive, and having a place in the wider scope of the narrative I was confined to.  
ROSE: But nonetheless, ever since I died, I’ve been quite disappointed with the total of ghostly advice I’ve been invited to give.  
JAKE: Dear god i havent.  
JAKE: Please dont take any advice from me.

In the company of these doomed-timeline afterechoes, your despair is not lessened, but it is… muted.

Hey, also, isn’t Jake your orange friend’s – you can’t even call him that sarcastically, actually. Isn’t that your orange enemy’s will they or won’t they matesprit-friend?

You wonder what on earth he could have done to merit that level of implied bitterness.

TEREZI: WOW TH1S 1S 4LL V3RY N1C3 JUST L1K3 HUM4N C4MP1NG  
TEREZI: 3XC3PT MOR3 FUCK3ED UP B3C4US3 1TS W1TH D34D T33NS  
TEREZI: HOW D1D TH3 TWO OF YOU 3V3N D13  
ROSE: Oh, I had a bit of a case of the horrorterrors and set out on a poorly-thought-out revenge quest. Got stabbed by Jack Noir.  
ROSE: Not the most successful derangement arc that has ever come to pass, but certainly aesthetically memorable.  
ROSE: The version of me that went on was my dream-self, who immediately tore off on a different suicide quest. Which is also the thing I would have done, had I been the Rose Lalonde with a chance at a maintained consciousness.  
JAKE: Well i jumped in front of a sword for someone who’d just threatened me with lifelong enslavement.  
JAKE: And then she died right after anyway.  
TEREZI: WOW  
TEREZI: YOU W1N WORST D34TH  
JAKE: Well its always nice to be a winner!  
JAKE: Anyway jane and i woke up as ghosts next to each other but i ended up kind of drifting around until i met rose in a dream bubble.  
JAKE: A guy with silly horns asked us if we wanted to join an army but we both thought that on the whole maybe not.  
TEREZI: HUH  
TEREZI: YOU KNOW 1 DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT YOU, 3NGL1SH  
TEREZI: BUT 1 4SSUM3 ROS3 KN3W TH4T W4S MOR3 OR L3SS H3R L4ST CH4NC3 4T ST4K1NG SOM3 CL41M TO R3L3V4NCE?  
ROSE: Oh, certainly.  
ROSE: But a hollow, meaningless relevance, wouldn’t you agree?  
ROSE: One of thousands.  
ROSE: A bit part in a joke of an arc.  
ROSE: Instead, we carried our respective crucial segments of a story and now we are relevant to you, here.  
ROSE: I am not pleased by playing support player, as a whole. Once, whether or not I knew I could break the afterlife itself apart, I was certain I would attempt it just to see what happened.  
ROSE: It is discouraging, of course, that somebody else is already doing it, in so stylistically displeasing a way.  
ROSE: Regardless, I am sure few available ghost armies would give me a speaking part, though I would be delighted to learn I am wrong.  
TEREZI: YOU KNOW 1’M NOT 3X4CTLY PR1M3 R3L3V4NC3 M4T3R14L H3R3  
TEREZI: FUCK TH4T WORD TH4T WORD DO3SN’T 3V3N M4TT3R TO M3 BUT  
TEREZI: 1S 1T NOT PR3TTY CL34R H3R3 TH4T 1'V3 COMPR3H3NSIV3LY FUCK3ED 3V3RYTH1NG UP

JAKE: Now that’s a bit unfair!  
JAKE: Itd be a pretty sad world if all hope was lost would it not.  
TEREZI: YOU’R3 L1T3R4LLY D34D  
TEREZI: YOU 4R3 GO1NG TO DOUBL3 D13 ONC3 TH3 BL4CK HOL3 G3TS TO YOU  
JAKE: Well yeah.  
JAKE: And i also died for someone who had just said some things to me that made me feel fucking awful even though i guess i shouldnt blame her as she wasnt in her right mind.  
JAKE: Either time.  
JAKE: Anyway it wasnt any use because she died right after.  
JAKE: And i watched a version of YOU get beaten up right in front of me and didnt intervene!  
JAKE: But did you know that being shunted away from relevance actually has its upsides if youre someone like me?  
JAKE: At least i got to hang out with my good friend rose and think about my death and determine that maybe i didnt deserve it or the array of things that came before!  
JAKE: I wouldnt have chosen death its not like going home or some bullshit. I would have liked to go home and tell dirk i was sorry and also i guess tell him that hes a devilblasted doofus who should have just let on that he had feelings before i was high on trickster candy. He sure as hell never showed anything for it.  
JAKE: But its a chance to get to think about things.  
JAKE: Theres nothing out there that you cant make into a chance of some kind.   
TEREZI: 1 DON’T KNOW WH4T YOU'R3 LOOK1NG 4T 3NGL1SH  
TEREZI: BUT TH1S LOOKS L1K3 PR3TTY MUCH TH3 OPPOS1T3 OF 4 CH4NC3  
JAKE: Is she dead?  
JAKE: If she is then –  
ROSE: She’s not dead. And I don’t think she’s about to die either.  
JAKE: Oh!  
JAKE: Well i bet thats just about the best piece of news youve heard tonight.

TEREZI: WH4T DO YOU M34N SH3’S NOT DY1NG  
TEREZI: 1 W4NT TO L34V3 H3R3, TO COM3 B4CK  
TEREZI: B3C4US3 W1NN1NG H3R B4CK 1S MOR3 OR L3SS MY ON3 CH4NC3 4T B31NG SOM3ON3 1 DON’T D3SP1SE  
TEREZI: BUT HOW C4N 1 3V3N F1ND 4 W4Y TO 34RTH C FROM H3R3  
TEREZI: H1GHBLOODS T4K3 4 LONG T1M3 TO D13 OF BLOOD LOSS BUT 1T DO3S H4PP3N  
TEREZI: 4ND 1 C4N’T 3V3N W4K3 H3R UP!

You are not going to do this. You are not going to break down about your own fuckups in front of some bit-part versions of Rose Lalonde and Jake fucking English, and all evidence that you’re already doing so can go fuck itself.

ROSE: She is not waking up, but this is not due to blood loss.  
ROSE: The shards of reality that landed in her...  
ROSE: They are not shards of reality, but narrative.  
ROSE: It is narrative that drives her fate now, and yours.  
TEREZI: COULD 1 H4V3 TH4T 1N PL41N –  
ROSE: Someone thinks the proper narrative resolution for her, here, is a death, heroic or otherwise.  
ROSE: A careful removal from relevance.  
ROSE: There is someone else who thinks otherwise.

Rose looks directly at you.

JAKE: So then its okay after all!  
JAKE: All you have to do is make sure your version of the story bests the other shittier version in a round of mano a mano.  
JAKE: With some kind of…   
ROSE: Mindy thing?  
JAKE: Some kind of mindy thing!

Maybe it’s how earnestly Jake makes up facts about what you are capable and not capable of doing; maybe it’s the fact that, when Rose explains it, something about it feels at least vaguely approachable.

Regardless, a feeling stirs in you. You resent it.

TEREZI: H3Y WH1CH3V3R ON3 OF YOU 1S DO1NG SOM3TH1NG W1TH YOUR STUP1D L1GHT 4ND OR HOP3 POW3RS  
TEREZI: PL34S3 STOP?  
ROSE: Doing things with my Light powers.  
ROSE: You mean like telling you information?  
TEREZI: TH4TS V3RY FUNNY  
TEREZI: BUT WH4T 1S TH3 PO1NT?  
TEREZI: DO YOU 3XP3CT M3 TO JUST M4K3 UP 4 N3W RUL3  
TEREZI: S4Y H3Y 1 GU3SS 1 C4N DO 4 BULLSH1T JOURN3Y TO TH3 C3NT3R OF VR1SK4’S BR41N  
TEREZI: T3LL H3R TO STOP B31NG S1LLY 4ND COM3 B4CK L1K3 SH3’S 4 HUM4N WR1GGL3R  
TEREZI: WH3N H4V3 1 3V3R H4D TH3 R1GHT TO T3LL H3R TO DO 4NYTH1NG  
JAKE: But give me a minute to work this out a bit.  
JAKE: You came after her didnt you?  
JAKE: Why on earth if n–  
TEREZI: YOU TH1NK 1 C4M3 H3R3 OUT OF L1K3  
TEREZI: HOP3  
TEREZI: 4ND NOT F33L1NG M1S3R4BL3 ON 34RTH C, NOT TH3 F4CT TH4T TH1S W4S L1T3R4LLY TH3 ONLY T3N4BL3 OPT1ON  
TEREZI: NOT TH3 CH4NC3 TH4T 1’LL 31TH3R F1ND H3R OR D13  
TEREZI: W1TH BOTH B31NG…  
TEREZI: OH MY FUCK1NG GOD WHY 4M 1 3V3N T3LL1NG YOU TH1S  
ROSE: That’s a good question.  
ROSE: Is it because you have entirely avoided telling anything like the truth for years on end?  
ROSE: So could it be a near-stranger’s and a not-quite-friend’s ghosts are the breaking point?  
ROSE: We are the height of irrelevance, after all, if you follow the old artificer’s tyrannical model. Placed here for the purpose of exposition alone.  
ROSE: Ready, as you kindly reminded us, to spiral away to our double-deaths.  
TEREZI: SO NOW TH3 L1GHT PL4Y3R 1S GO1NG TO PR34CH TO M3 ABOUT N4RR4T1V3 R3L3V4NC3  
JAKE: Relevance has done jack dick for me personally.  
JAKE: You must understand half of roses dooblydoo about this stuff flies right by me but it doesnt change that i liked being alive and having friends better than i liked being important in the grander scheme of what happened to them and god forbid between them.  
JAKE: Maybe my other self will get to have an easier time of it i dont know.  
JAKE: Better chance is he gets more time to bungle things up even more comprehensively. But hes alive and honestly as long as theres stuff to try theres worlds where things go more or less alright.  
JAKE: For all of us.

You don’t say anything. Your data on him, after all, is incomplete.

Still. Still. Alone, in the wake of the despair that watching Vriska lie still and near-dead has worked through you, the temptation to lie down and let the story end in the worst possible way had seemed stronger than ever.

Jake, who may or may not be softly glowing, and Rose, watching you intently with her absent eyes, and even the memory of Dirk’s ridiculous tantrum by the black hole, spurs you to be something more than positively fucking hopeless.

TEREZI: OK4Y  
TEREZI: 1 4M 4SK1NG B3C4US3 YOU 4R3 SH1TTY GHOSTS WHO DO NOT M4TT3R  
TEREZI: DO YOU H4V3 4NY SUGG3STIONS FOR WH4T 1 SHOULD 3V3N DO N3XT  
ROSE: Oh?  
ROSE: So we are no longer giving up.  
ROSE: I see you’ve admitted to the influence of, dare I say...  
ROSE: ...  
ROSE: Choiceless hope...  
ROSE: In the course of your quest.  
TEREZI: 1 GU3SS?  
TEREZI: WH4T TH3 FUCK W4S UP W1TH TH3 S1GN1F1C4NT P4US3  
ROSE: What pause?

Rose raises a single eyebrow at you so distinctly that you can smell it. She did that on the meteor, too. Your Rose.

TEREZI: YOU KNOW WH4T  
TEREZI: N3V3R M1ND

You tilt your head up to face the part of the dream bubble that you can smell and imagine tilting up and around you like the dome of a dreary Earth C government building. Maintained by Life, but held together by memory.

ROSE: You are the Seer of Mind.  
ROSE: To be a student of your aspect, it is your right to visualize and navigate it as fits your needs.

She takes your hand in her deceptively corporeal one – but for the eyes, she might as well not be dead – to land on the prone Vriska’s shoulder, near the wound.

Cautiously, you hook an arm under Vriska’s shoulder and lift her up to face you.

The bleeding has slowed; still, the blood spilled across her face and clothes where the story-shards had pierced her remains extensive.

Story shards. You remember Remem8ering, but that is not what you need to do now; you only need to See. To See well enough that you open up a place to see more.

As you close your eyes, you don’t know if you are setting out to change the fabric of the Dream Bubble or to see some part of Vriska’s own Mind, or something in-between. You doubt the technicalities matter in the question of whether she will ever forgive you if she lives. For dragging her away from the battle; for invading her mind. For any of it.

When you look up, a white glowing door, not unlike the one you stepped through into the new universe.

JAKE: What can i say miss pyrope.  
JAKE: But that if you believe hard enough in imaginary things that makes them slightly less fake.  
TEREZI: J3SUS YOU 4R3 4NNOY1NG

You walk towards the Door with Vriska over her shoulder; then stop at the last moment and turn around.

TEREZI: UM  
TEREZI: 1F 1 M4K3 1T B4CK TO 34RTH C  
TEREZI: 1 W1LL B3 SUR3 TO TH4NK YOU BOTH?  
TEREZI: 4ND 1F 1 D13 OUT TH3R3  
TEREZI: 1 W1LL H4UNT YOUR L1V1NG S3LV3S!  
TEREZI: 4ND YOU W1LL F33L TERRIBLE >:]  
JAKE: Wow i cant imagine what it’s like to feel terrible.  
ROSE: I’ve never felt terrible in my life. No version of me has. When people describe me it is as a “happy-go-lucky little daisy.”  
JAKE: Hey. I think im the daisy in this friendship personally.  
JAKE: Youre already the rose.  
ROSE: He thinks he’s really funny.  
JAKE: I think im hilarious.  
TEREZI: WH4T3V3R  
TEREZI: C4N’T 3V3N B3 S1NC3R3 4ROUND GHOSTS W1THOUT G3TT1NG DUNK3D ON

The door closes behind you.

A rush of images. Words. Sounds. Vriska vanishes from your arms just as you feel your glasses inexplicably reform on your nose.

Texts. Contexts. For a moment everything is around you and, by extension nothing; you cannot perceive things that fast; you are sure that even being able to see would not have made a difference.

Then it clears away, and the overwhelming flow of sensory memory hits you all at once.

You are standing on the edge of a cliff. The night air is still, but for a few stray breezes.

Two moons – one green, one pink – hang above you.

[==>](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28100313/chapters/71188785#main)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SO this was really prologue part 2 but thank you for making it this far! the next update should be out at the end of this month/start of the next one one but again, who really knows lol
> 
> INFINITE THANKS TO: [esther](https://twitter.com/0pacifica) for the best-ever classpect thoughts, [rads](https://twitter.com/hulknaps) for first saying the phrase "derangement arc" which has lived in my head rent-free ever since, [gene](https://twitter.com/AdvrsAccountant) for letting me mine his dialogue for jake-rose friendship shenanigans, all of the above for expert jakethoughts, [julia](https://twitter.com/DEATHMETALJOCK) for expert rosethoughts and prosethoughts, [phoebe](https://twitter.com/wiIIowtara) and [kyli](https://twitter.com/lightssylph) for enabling and reciprocating incoherent vrisrezi yelling, plus [fish](https://twitter.com/Superfishack) and [sofi](https://twitter.com/AslanZounder) and all of the above for having stellar thoughts on a little webcomic called homestuck as a whole, and for the encouragement + promotion that made this fic and its audience possible!! and also you, the reader, for reading it! 
> 
> finally i myself am [chronotopics](https://twitter.com/chronotopics), come say hi


	3. CHAPTER II: CLIFFSIDE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> M3MORY L4N3'S 4 B1TCH, OR: I showed you our past, stop texting me!!!!!!!!

You stand on the edge of a cliff, somewhere in the wilds of Alternia. 

You have smelled this place before, you think, both in person and on the three-year journey through the afterlife that followed the game. 

Something feels different than those times, though; it’s a sense in the air itself. Where the Furthest Ring in its disintegrating stages was entrenched with encroaching nothingness, this is saturated with the opposite. A story is not unraveling, but winding together into the foundations of all that will come after. 

It is this thought that stops you in your tracks; you take another deep sniff of the air.

Back on the real Alternia, you have never smelled this place, but you think you have seen it, seen it when you were were something like five sweeps old. Seen it when you last played FLARP against Team Charge; it would have been, then, one of the last things you've seen.

You are suddenly perplexed. 

You don’t know what there is to do besides move, and so you set off in the only direction that does not end in a sheer, dangerous drop. (Suspicion pings at the back of your head.) Green grass bends beneath the soles of your shoes, and the rose-and-lime light of the moons spills over you, flooding your senses. 

The sky is an inky blue-black, suffused with impossibly bright color. Just breathing in this air threatens to bring tears to your eyes. A half-clouded night, a soft wind; it could be an evening at your hive.

You are honest enough with yourself to know that your memories of your hive in the days when you could only smell it are not stellar. A lot of being alone; a lot of ignoring messages from Vriska. Some half-hearted flirting with Karkat, and a lot of trying to feel good about it.

Still, memories have a way of collapsing into homogeny. In the same way the meteor’s cold light and dark rooms have warmed and brightened in hindsight after the fact of Vriska’s presence, Alternia is not a sequence of years. If you don’t pay attention, by default it is an expanse of rose-lit, lime-scented nights spent sailing across the sea, right up until everything blows up in, well, in Vriska’s face. But in yours, too, if more abstractly.

It has always been like this! The future, a blank void; the present, a thing you must tolerate; and the past, a golden country you cannot escape missing, even as you recall each flaw it had in detail. It has happened to the meteor, even, just as it you feel the effects of remembering Alternia like this.

How many times have you looked at the Earth C night sky out of Jade Harley’s window, or the window of your own apartment, or up from the ground where John’s car is parked somewhere out in the open, and watched a cloud cover the Earth moon, and tried to pretend it could replace the sky you grew up under? 

If Vriska is dead – 

Vriska is not dead. 

But if she was, this would not be such a bad place to die. 

The thought jolts you into something like a capacity for criticizing your own stupidest thoughts as they arrive. You _could_ have died here, if you’d been culled at Conscription. 

Or you’d have become conscripted, and trusted Alternia’s laws, and hunted Vriska and people like her down to the ends of the galaxy.

It’s easy to see possibilities, here in the place where you grew up. Would she have killed her lusus, failed to show up for Conscription, or would she have met Alternia’s challenges and beat it at is own games? And would you have been sent after her, against all odds? Will there have been another way to approach the sea of untenable choices that lies before you, and would you have ever, _ever_ been able to recognize the untenability of killing her before it was too late?

Even in this universe, after all, you hadn’t managed it on your own. 

A gust of wind blows from what you think is the direction of the sea. (Even with the help of dream bubbles, you realize your awareness of Alternian topography depends more on strung-together memory than anything like knowledge. This is not a welcome realization.)

You step forward, and without warning –

Smoke hits you, smoke and the hissing crackle-pop that is left behind in the wake of yellowblood psionics. When you’re accustomed enough to the scent and layout of the scene before you to distinguish it, you don’t need to smell the wreck of Aradia’s hive to know where you are.

All capacity for nostalgia, for contemplating alternate universes – for anything other than your burning need to understand – vanishes instantly.

This landscape is made from your memories, or perhaps from Vriska’s; presumably either hers or a combination of both, because you have never seen the ruins of Aradia’s hive in person. Or it’s like the dream bubbles, even, fashioned from the collective memories of everyone who has ever made contact with this multiversal farce you’ve taken part in. You are quite sure there’s no precedent for this, at least nothing accessible to _you_. 

You will have to be the precedent yourself. 

Still, one thing is clear, and it’s that Vriska’s memories are behind at least a part of this. There had been no trace of these events in your head, no expectations for what roads you’d be led down by the paths of Hope, Light, Life, and Mind, when you opened that door and bid goodbye to Rose and Jake. 

If Vriska is trying to lead you down some kind of obstacle course of your collective worst mistakes, there is going to be hell to pay. 

You walk towards the hive, much as the idea of encountering a dead thirteen-year-old Aradia discomforts you. (It has been three sweeps. A short time in the long run, maybe, but apparently not long enough to keep the habit of impassivity when looking at dead children.)

The moons still shine, but all illusions of being on Alternia-the-planet have vanished. You walk through illusion. This is not the first time, or the last.

Before you’ve reached the ruins, she’s appeared in your direct path, as if she'd always been there. 

A chill washes over you, one that you don’t think she can control. You have never seen her like this; you are not sure, even, that you could have.

TEREZI: 4R4D14  
TEREZI: H1  
TEREZI: OR...  
TEREZI: H1 4G41N?  
ARADIA: its interesting  
ARADIA: if y0u had cared to visit these ruins in life  
ARADIA: bef0re we c0nspired to successfully destr0y the w0rld  
ARADIA: y0u would n0t have seen me  
ARADIA: but you are unm00red from rules  
ARADIA: unm00red from the proper order  
ARADIA: i w0uld envy y0u i think  
ARADIA: if that was a thing i c0uld feel  
ARADIA: y0u are not d00med  
ARADIA: furthermore y0u never knew the weight of being d00med  
TEREZI: ...  
TEREZI: NOT N3V3R.

She gives you a piercing glance. 

ARADIA: 0ther lifetimes d0 n0t c0unt  
ARADIA: they are afterech0es  
ARADIA: useful in serving a purp0se t0wards the greater g0al  
ARADIA: n0thing m0re than that  
ARADIA: th0ugh 0f c0urse that is what i believe today  
ARADIA: the next time that a great c0smic force will pr0pel me t0wards a new stage of existence im sure it c0uld change  
ARADIA: either way, y0u are as much y0ur d00med self as i am death’s handmaid  
TEREZI: WH4T 4 N33DL3SSLY DR4M4T1C COMP4R1SON  
ARADIA: 0u0  
ARADIA: thats an enigmatic smile  
ARADIA: i w0uld offer y0u a seat  
ARADIA: f0r the purp0ses of h0spitality  
ARADIA: but there’s really n0t much left here huh

It’s been a long time since you remembered that day in proper detail. Tangled circles of betrayal, fury, and cold confirmation. You had wondered, after all. If today you have thought, walking through Alternia, that the golden country of the past was always undermined by the heartless force that it turned you into, back then it was undermined by the force of Vriska. By your question, asked night after night as freezing salt spray landed on what was then a cool pair of cosplay glasses: _even now, is she redeemable?_

(You hadn’t stopped to think, _are we?_ )

TEREZI: W3R3 YOU 4NGRY?  
TEREZI: B4CK TH3N, 1 M34N  
ARADIA: i think that 0ne is determinable. n0t me, but 0thers.  
ARADIA: anger is an em0tion 0ther pe0ple feel  
ARADIA: including me  
ARADIA: 0ther versions of me  
ARADIA: y0u were angry after this i remember  
ARADIA: y0u tried to kill her  
TEREZI: Y34H  
ARADIA: i c0uld alm0st find that sweet  
ARADIA: if n0t fundamentally misguided  
TEREZI: W3LL, Y34H! OBV1OUSLY!

On the meteor and thereafter, you have tried to tell yourself on many occasions, that the score had been settled; more than settled. But gaining body parts back does not reverse the fact that that you started a cycle of betrayal that took place between the two of you specifically. Does not undo the knowledge that you turned on Vriska the way you let people die for the high crime of _cheating at FLARP_ , does not mitigate the memory of weighing standards and rules in your six-sweep-old brain and cackling at your own cleverness when a plan to kill her came together in your head. 

ARADIA: i d0nt mean m0rally  
ARADIA: th0ugh that t00 pr0bably  
ARADIA: i mean the twelve 0f us had t0 have always lived  
ARADIA: f0r all to unf0ld as it must have  
ARADIA: s0 t00 is it misguided t0 c0ndemn y0urself f0r the act  
ARADIA: y0u and me and tavr0s and vriska were each 0nly what we had t0 be  
TEREZI: BUT  
TEREZI: BUT TH4T’S WORS3!  
TEREZI: 1F W3 4LL N3V3R H4D 4 CH4NC3 TO B3 4NYTH1NG OTH3R TH4N SOM3 K1ND OF FUCK3D UP  
TEREZI: YOU G3T HOW TH4T’S WORS3, R1GHT?  
ARADIA: maybe  
ARADIA: i d0nt kn0w  
ARADIA: having always kn0wn the end in sight?  
ARADIA: i never had an0ther pathway t0 conceptualize  
ARADIA: but i can tell you this  
ARADIA: we are made as 0urselves, the culmination of th0usands 0f years 0f planning  
ARADIA: this isn’t true f0r y0u n0w, but it was true f0r us then  
ARADIA: if y0u want s0me0ne to blame  
ARADIA: d0n’t blame y0urself or vriska  
TEREZI: 1 N3V3R D1D  
ARADIA: ...  
TEREZI: YOU KNOW WH4T 1 M34N!  
TEREZI: 1 H4V3N’T B33N BL4M1NG VR1SKA, NOT FOR SW33PS NOW  
TEREZI: ...  
TEREZI: DO3S SH3 W4NT M3 TO?  
TEREZI: 1S TH4T WHY SH3 PUT M3 H3R3?  
TEREZI: 1 DON’T 4PPR3C14T3 G3TT1NG TH3 CH4RG3-SCOURG3 R3V3NG3 CYCL3 GR34T3ST H1TS TOUR  
ARADIA: i d0nt know what i can tell y0u frankly  
ARADIA: im the afterimage 0f an imprint  
ARADIA: substance-wise, l0w on the tier list  
ARADIA: my mem0ries are 0f a different quest  
ARADIA: a different drive  
ARADIA: i suggest y0u keep m0ving  
ARADIA: see where y0u’re taken  
ARADIA: it has w0rked for me

You look over her and want to ask: has it? She is far from the at-peace Aradia that escorted you to the battle. She’s a memory of an Aradia that _was_ but isn’t. The haunting of a haunting.

You wonder what else will haunt you before this journey is done. 

TEREZI: GOODBY3, 4R4D1A.

And then you’re walking away, over the hills and towards the blue lights playing in the distance. You never find out what these did. You’d never been to Aradia’s hive. You’d never bothered to understand Alternia’s meteorological phenomena.

You take her advice, because it worked the first time, for a given and very unsteady value of ‘worked’. And so it doesn’t shock you, this time, when the scene changes.

What happens next does, though.

No thought, no sense, only blinding sunlight. 

It shouldn’t have shocked you at all. There’s a pattern, right?

[You visited this afternoon in the dream bubbles, once, with Vriska](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25466323/chapters/62839252), but the pain was not so bad then. You had found your hive, like you’d somehow managed to do all the way back then, though fuck, maybe that was just because you were destined not to die. A pawn in a game. There’s no purpose to you now, and your drive is ever-wavering.

Your skin feels as close to on fire as it can get without venturing into the literal. It’s a mitigation of the worst pain you’ve ever felt, maybe, but still a recreation more accurate than that of any regular dream bubble. You drop to your knees and land on familiar grass, grass that would smell like home if it didn’t smell like the day several crucial mistakes were made in a row – inavertible mistakes, mistakes that shaped you, mistakes that you can’t and don’t resent, and yet –

TEREZI: WH4T3V3R 3NT1TY… 1S CONTROLL1NG TH1S  
TEREZI: DO M3 4 F4VOR 4ND L34V3 1T  
TEREZI: YOU C4N’T BL1ND M3 TWIC3, 4SSHOL3  
TEREZI: 4ND WH4T3V3R YOU’R3 S3T ON PROV1NG  
TEREZI: YOU C4N’T DO TH4T 31TH3R

Still, you find yourself ducking forward instinctively to protect the skin of your face from the sun, and your face lands on a warm, living body, skin warm like a rustblood’s –

It is not a rustblood. You know this without having to ask. When you bring a wet hand to your lips, you taste your own blood, teal and boiling hot; and still everything is red, still you feel less real than everything around you, harsh and unquestionable and discordant.

You are sure that burns are forming against your hands; that the harshness of the light is about to immolate you altogether –

TEREZI: TON3 DOWN TH3 M3LODR4M4  
TEREZI: TH1S  
TEREZI: 1S 4 FUCK1NG 

TEREZI: M3MORY.

This is your mindscape. This is your initiative. This is _your_ Vriska, and the door _you_ opened, and this has already happened to you, and it is not an immutable dream bubble; it is made at least in part of your own initiative, which means that you can _CHANGE_ IT.

TEREZI: SHIFT ==>

You open your eyes.

The sea is placid and the moons are steady. The memory of your younger self, near death, has nearly faded already; maybe old habits die hard after all. Or maybe it just isn’t real; if you were afraid of reconstructed memories, you’d have to be afraid at every moment of your life. Any fear you’ve been feeling for what you’ll be shown has vanished altogether. 

Memory is the only real thing there is. It is also the falsest thing in the world.

TEREZI: YOU 4R3 GONN4 H4V3 TO THR34T3N M3 W1TH MOR3 TH4N 1M4G3S OF TH1NGS W3’V3 BOTH 4LR34DY S33N.  
TEREZI: 4ND 1N G3N3R4L?  
TEREZI: YOU 4R3 GO1NG TO H4V3 TO STOP FUCK1NG 4ROUND, VR1SK4.  
TEREZI: 1 DON’T KNOW WH4T YOU’R3 DO1NG  
TEREZI: BUT W3’R3 GO1NG TO N33D TO T4LK.

And then she’s there.

She appears as she must have the last time you saw her face-to-face on Alternia - intact, six sweeps, inexplicably your height. She is looking at you with an expression you don’t like.

TEREZI: 4R3 YOU R34LLY VR1SK4?  
VRISKA: The term ‘8r8in ghost’ has 8een used 8efore.  
VRISKA: 8y total losers! 8ut still.  
TEREZI: TH1S L4NDSC4P3 1S M4D3 OF OUR SH4R3D M3MOR13S, YOURS 4ND M1N3  
TEREZI: BUT 1’M ST1LL M3  
TEREZI: M4D3 OF JUST MYS3LF 4ND MY CHO1C3S  
VRISKA: Suuuuuuuure.  
VRISKA: If you say so!  
TEREZI: OH, FUCK OFF  
TEREZI: OBV1OUSLY Y3S 1 4M M4D3 NOT OF MYS3LF BUT OF 3V3RY POSS1BL3 CHUNK OF CONT3XT TH4T FORM3D M3  
TEREZI: 4ND 3V3RY L13 TH4T 3V3RYON3 3LS3 H4S 3V3R BOUGHT OR PR3T3ND3D TO BUY 4BOUT M3!  
TEREZI: 1 DON’T TH1NK TH4T’S R3L3V4NT TO TH3 PR3S3NT MOM3NT THOUGH  
TEREZI: WH4T 1 M34NT W4S TH4T 1 4M M3, NOT SOM3ON3'S M3MORY OR PROJ3CT1ON OF M3  
TEREZI: 4ND 1 DON’T D3C1D3 WH3R3 1’M GO1NG, 4T L34ST 1 H4V3N’T B33N  
TEREZI: M4YB3 1 COULD  
TEREZI: M4YB3 1 SHOULD ST4RT!  
TEREZI: UP UNT1L NOW 1’V3 B33N JUST DO1NG WH4T3V3R  
TEREZI: W4S 1T YOU?  
TEREZI: 4R3 YOU L34D1NG M3 TO 4R4D14, 4ND TO TH3 SUN –

VRISKA: That’s an interesting tr8in of thought!  
VRISKA: It really m8kes you think, if you’re the kind of loser who ‘thinks’ about this stuff.  
TEREZI: YOU V3RY MUCH DO TH1NK 4BOUT STUFF  
TEREZI: 4LL YOU DO 1S 3V4LU4T3 STOR13S 1N S34RCH OF H3RO1C POS1T1ONS TO OCCUPY  
TEREZI: WHY 4R3 YOU PR3T3ND1NG NOT TO C4R3  
TEREZI: WHY 3R3 YOU L4RP1NG YOURS3LF 4T S1X SW33PS  
VRISKA: Are we in the Vriska meta economy now? I’m flattered!  
VRISKA: All you do is evalu8 ME, apparently.  
VRISKA: Gr8 word, evalu8.  
VRISKA: Hmmm. If I said evalu8, would I spell it evalu8 or evalu8te? Do we prioritize phonetics or clarity?  
VRISKA: These are the kinds of questions we can discuss at length now that we’re in the analyzing Vriska tr8de.  
VRISKA: We could go on for hours! I don’t know how much you’ve seen of this misera8le little dreamsc8pe you’ve shoved us into, 8ut it turns out I’m very discussable.  
VRISKA: 8y the way, are we going to talk a8out how you just pulled me out of the most important 8attle of my life?  
TEREZI: SO 1 W4S R1GHT  
TEREZI: YOU’RE M4D 4T M3 FOR TH4T 4ND YOU’R3 TRY1NG TO PROV3 SOM3 K1ND OF CONFUS3D PO1NT  
TEREZI: 1T’S NOT WORK1NG  
TEREZI: TH4T W4S 4 N4STY TR1CK W1TH TH3 SUN  
VRISKA: Oh, I know, right????????  
VRISKA: Who would do th8t to her best friend in retali8tion for a bit of light eye-expoding!  
VRISKA: Th8t’s just fucked up!!!!!!!!  
TEREZI: TH4T’S NOT WH4T 1 –

You didn’t fall for bait like this at six sweeps! At the start of the game, you would have been quite good at this. But now you are eight sweeps old and entirely out of practice. 

On the meteor, in the last three human years of your life, Vriska had become the only person with whom you were able to let up the word games, the _mind_ games, that you played with everyone around you. 

These are not terms you have to agree to. 

TEREZI: 1 4M NOT 1N TH3 MOOD FOR 4 G4M3 OF WHO 1S TH3 CL3V3R3ST 4ND M34N3ST 4ND MOST 1MP3N3TR4BL3  
TEREZI: 3SP3CI4LLY NOT W1TH SOM3ON3 WHO WON’T 4DM1T TO WH3TH3R SH3’S 4 P4RT1CUL4RLY CRU3L F1GM3NT OF MY 1M4G1N4TION!  
TEREZI: SO PL34S3 T3LL M3.  
TEREZI: WH4T TH3 FUCK 1S TH3 PO1NT OF SHOW1NG M3 TH1S  
TEREZI: 1 W4S TH3R3 TH3 F1RST T1M3!  
TEREZI: 1F YOU’R3 TRY1NG TO R3M1ND M3 OF TH3 TH1NGS YOU’V3 DON3  
TEREZI: 1T DOESN’T CH4NG3 4NYTH1NG –

Vriska’s eyes flash dangerously.

VRISKA: Is it me trying to remind you? Lol!  
VRISKA: Haven’t you even considered that it might be you trying to remind yourself?  
VRISKA: May8e you never worked out a way to put those days behind you.

There’s a long silence; then you let out a breath and let go of her, stepping backwards. 

TEREZI: TH4T –  
TEREZI: TH4T M1GHT B3 TH3 L34ST F41R TH1NG YOU’V3 3V3R S41D TO M3

You’d jammed about the old days on the meteor! Quite incessantly, actually, you’d tried to assure Vriska that you were just as much in the wrong as she was, that (as far as you understood – and back then you had been too young to understand everything that you have since then speculated on, everything that makes you sick to your stomach to consider) she was being manipulated by a cosmic force of unknowable power, one which you unleashed on her in a fit of what you’d thought, then, was cleverness.

VRISKA: F8ir?  
VRISKA: I cheat, remem8er!  
VRISKA: It’s kind of my thing?  
TEREZI: 1F 1M 4NGRY 4T 4NYON3  
TEREZI: 1TS 4T M3  
TEREZI: FOR NOT UND3RST4ND1NG  
TEREZI: FOR -

It’s too much to say. 

Whatever bug in your system had enabled you to speak freely about even a few things on the meteor had been stifled over the course of your months on Earth C. You feel the past drawing you in – the wrong past, the one in which admitting to wrongdoing is a kind of surrender, in which you desperately want to believe that whatever you did was a just thing. 

It’s not the right timeline for these thoughts. The life of your other self hangs over you; your _own_ life hangs over you, the weight of being yourself and all of the consequences of your own existence – 

You are the version of yourself, most likely, that has caused the least damage to the world around you. And yet – 

TEREZI: TO 4CT L1K3 YOU’R3 TH3 ON3 1 H4V3N’T FORGIV3N  
TEREZI: TO 4CT L1K3 LOOK1NG AT TH1NGS YOU’V3 DON3 Y34RS 4GO 1S GO1NG TO M4K3 M3 CLUTCH 4T TH3 P34RLS TH4T 1’M NOT FUCK1NG W34R1NG  
TEREZI: YOU 4R3 SO  
TEREZI: *FUCK1NG*  
TEREZI: S3LF-C3NT3R3D!

You turn on your heel and walk away. Away from the ocean. Away from Vriska. Away from the conversation that you are suddenly and painfully incapable of having.

VRISKA: You don’t have to leave, you know!!!!!!!!  
VRISKA: You called me with your mind, dum8ass, you can 8anish me with it!!!!!!!!  
VRISKA: WH8T W8S 8LL THE BR8GG1NG 8BOUT HOW THIS IS YOUR MINDSC8PE, THEN?????????  
VRISKA: Whose narrative authority is it NOW!?  
VRISKA: HINT!!!!!!!!  
VRISKA: NEITHER of ours!!!!!!!!!

Her words echo in your ears, and you stop.

TEREZI: OK4Y  
TEREZI: VR1SK4

TEREZI: 1’M SORRY.  
TEREZI: 1F YOU 4CT L1K3 YOU’R3 NOT S1X 4NYMORE TH3N 1 W1LL TOO.

You turn around.

Vriska is gone. It’s just the dock again.

TEREZI: …  
TEREZI: COM3 B4CK?  
TEREZI: PL34S3?

The sea around you is quiet and still. 

TEREZI: 1 DON’T KNOW WH4T 1 FUCK1NG 3XP3CTED

You turn away from the dock; looking at it is too much to process, a potent reminder of each time that you have spent sitting here, dangling your legs just a smidge too close for comfort to the dark water below and all that lurked beneath its surface. It had been a daring thing. Her, not born to the sea but mastering it all the same; you, following her. 

For all your capacity for competition, you’d never minded the designation that you were following her. A support to stand behind the hero of the story; moving what’s in the background; holding her back, if need be. 

Every childhood fantasy backfires! This is not news.

You’re not looking where you’re going, only that you’re going far away from here. Alternia moves around you; for a moment, you’re walking, really, on air or through darkness moreso than anything else. 

Before it lasts long enough for a slight onset of fear to escalate into fullscale panic, your feet are on solid ground again, and you’re exactly back where you started.

A cliffside. The wind. The moons. 

You do not appreciate feeling as if you have been led in a large, stupid circle! 

It might be time to consider your next move. But you’ve barely had time to sit on the edge of the cliff and swing your legs over it, the way you used to over the roof of your apartment complex your old hivestem complex, when there’s movement behind you, and a presence you haven’t come face-to-face with since brief encounters in the dream bubbles.

TEREZI: …  
TEREZI: T4VROS?  
TEREZI: *S1GH*  
TAVROS: oH,  
TAVROS: bEING ADDRESSED IN THIS MANNER HITS ME WITH SUCH A BURST OF NOSTALGIA,  
TEREZI: TH4T'S NOT WH4T 1 – *4NOTH3R S1GH, NOT 4S 4N 1NSULT TOW4RDS YOU BUT JUST 1N G3N3R4L*  
TEREZI: 1 SHOULD H4V3 PROB4BLY 3XP3CT3D TO S33 YOU 4NYW4Y HUH

It would probably have meant more to see a dead friend if you hadn’t seen this many iterations of him in the dream bubbles. You wonder whether he’s more ghost or memory, and whether the two were always really the same thing after all. 

TEREZI: SO D1D VR1SK4 PUT YOU H3R3?  
TAVROS: i’M ALWAYS HERE,  
TAVROS: dEFINING THE MEMORY OF THIS PLACE,  
TAVROS: iNEXTRICABLE FROM IT,  
TAVROS: tHE WAY ALL OF US EXIST IN PART, aS PICTURES IN SOMEONE ELSE’S EYES,  
TAVROS: oF THOSE WHO KNEW US AND THOSE WHO COULDN’T HAVE,

Everyone’s _really_ set on discussing the nature of selfhood with you lately.

TEREZI: THOS3 WHO COULDN’T HAV3?  
TAVROS: sURE,  
TAVROS: iN THE SAME WAY THAT EACH OF US EXISTS INDEPENDENTLY IN THE MEMORIES OF THOSE AROUND US, oR IN THE LIVING IMAGES OF OURSELVES THAT COEXIST WITH US,  
TAVROS: oTHER MES THAT EXIST IN VRISKA'S HEAD, aND IN THE SAME WAY, iN THE HEADS OF ONLOOKERS,  
TAVROS: iN MUCH THE SAME WAY THAT THERE ARE OTHER YOUS,  
TAVROS: oTHER VRISKAS,  
TAVROS: aND OURSELVES, iF WE CAN CALL IT THAT, sOMEWHERE,  
TEREZI: T4VROS, NO OFF3NS3, BUT YOU SOUND...  
TEREZI: D1FF3R3NT  
TEREZI: >:[  
TAVROS: yES, tHAT WOULD BE BECAUSE I’M ACTING AS A SORT OF,,,,,  
TAVROS: aUTHORIAL MOUTHPIECE?

TAVROS: tHAT'S WHAT I MEANT, yOU SEE,  
TAVROS: oR WHAT THE IDEA I'M MEANT TO CONVEY MEANT,  
TAVROS: iN THE HANDS OF AN IMPERFECT PUPPETMASTER, wE BECOME NOTHING MORE THAN THE WORDS THEY WANT US TO SAY,  
TAVROS: aND NOT THE WORDS THAT THE VIVID WORD-IMAGE OF US IN THEIR HEADS INFLUENCES THEM INTO GIVING US,  
TAVROS: tHAT'S NONE OF US, tHEN, oN THE SAME PAGE IN ANY SETTING,  
TAVROS: nONE OF US EXISTING THE SAME WAY, iN ANYONE ELSE'S MIND,  
TAVROS: aS IT TURNS OUT,  
TAVROS: fOR SOME OF US, mETA-AWARENESS OF THIS SORT DOESN'T LEAD ANYWHERE FUN,  
TAVROS: nAMELY SOMETIMES IT LEADS TO THE KNOWLEDGE THAT YOU EXIST IN A PLACE THAT DESIGNATES YOU FOR A SINGLE ROLE, iN A STORY THAT'S NEVER BEEN ABOUT YOU,  
TAVROS: iS IT WORSE TO SUFFER, oN TERMS THAT ARE SOMETHING LIKE YOUR OWN, fOR THE SAKE OF MAKING AN AUDIENCE FEEL SOMETHING, aND ADVANCING A STORY,  
TAVROS: oR TO SUFFER, aS A MECHANISM FOR LAUNCHING THOUGHTS AND OPINIONS, cONCERNING SOMEONE WHO IS OBJECTIVELY MORE IMPORTANT THAN YOU,  
TAVROS: bECAUSE YOU OCCUPY A MODE OF EXISTENCE WHERE THESE THINGS CAN BE OBJECTIVE

Several thoughts race through your head at once as he delivers this speech. 

First: Tavros does not appear to be here to deliver a polemic. He is not standing poised for a confrontation like Vriska is, just speaking haltingly into the air. He is not set to unload an argument about Vriska's wrongdoings, about the worthiness of your journey. In fact, he has barely mentioned it at all.

Second: You find yourself understanding, and it makes something in you hurt more than you expected. You had been a means towards ends once, too. You _liked_ those purposes, or you’d thought you had; whatever external forces had validated your self-conception of heroism (you think of Vriska’s death, Just even as it dooms a timeline, and shudder), had been ones that you were sure were helping you.

Third: Still, a timeline where you God Tiered is a doomed one. The same is true for Tavros. 

Fourth: all four of you now. Aradia, Vriska, Tavros, yourself. Trapped into being the people you became, or grown into it even with other available options; manipulated by cosmic forces beyond your own comprehension, or social forces very much within your comprehension, or both at once.

That said, fifth: you are really, really not stuck in this dream bubble for the sake of another lecture.

TEREZI: W41T, OK4Y  
TEREZI: 1 DON’T N33D 4 R3FR3SHER ON N4RR4T1V3 R3L3VANC3 OR TH3 FUCK1NG 1NST3B1L1TY OF 1D3NT1TY 1’V3 THOUGHT 3NOUGH 4BOUT BOTH ON MY OWN  
TEREZI: ...  
TEREZI: WHY 4R3 YOU H3R3  
TEREZI: 4R3 YOU H3R3 B3C4US3 SH3 W4NTS YOU TO B3 H3R3?  
TAVROS: i ALREADY TOLD YOU, i THINK  
TAVROS: uNFORTUNATELY, i’M KIND OF A BIG DEAL IN THESE PARTS  
TEREZI: WH4T P4RTS T4VROS  
TAVROS: tHE... tHE DISPENSING JUDGEMENT ABOUT VRISKA’S CRIMES PART, oBVIOUSLY  
TEREZI: TH4T’S NOT WH4T 1’M H3R3 FOR  
TEREZI: 1 KN3W 3V3RYTH1NG H3R3 4LR34DY  
TEREZI: 1 W4S TH3R3 FOR 1T TH3 F1RST T1M3!  
TEREZI: JUST YOU B31NG H3R3 1S NOT 4BOUT TO UNDO Y34RS OF TH1NK1NG 4ND Y34RS OF SH1T H4PP3N1NG 4ND Y34RS OF UND3RST4ND1NG  
TEREZI: 1T DO3SN’T M34N TH4T WH4T H4PP3N3D TO YOU OR 4NY OF US 1S GOOD  
TEREZI: 1 JUST  
TEREZI: 1F W3’R3 B31NG CL3V3R 4BOUT PHR4S1NG  
TEREZI: 1 DON’T 4PPR3C14T3 TH3 RH3TOR1C4L 1NT3NT?  
TAVROS: oH,  
TAVROS: mY MISTAKE,  
TAVROS: tHEN WHAT’S ARE YOU DOING?  
TAVROS: iF NOT JUDGING HER CRIMES,  
TEREZI: TH1S 1S M3 G3TT1NG H3R B4CK!  
TEREZI: SH3’S B33N PR3TTY F1RMLY JUDG3D 4S B31NG –  
TEREZI: 4S D3S3RV1NG TO L1V3! OV3R 4ND OV3R!  
TEREZI: 1 DON’T KNOW WHY H3R BR41N CHOS3 TO W4LK M3 THROUGH H3R 4SSORT3D WRONGDO1NGS FROM Y34RS 4GO  
TEREZI: BUT 1T D3F1N1T3LY W4SN’T MY DO1NG!

You have to doubt it the moment you say it. 

TEREZI: ...  
TEREZI: YOU’R3 NOT GO1NG TO T3LL M3 1F 1T W4S, 4R3 YOU.

Another disappearing act.

TEREZI: V3RY FUCK1NG CL3V3R

Something about the end of the conversation doesn’t ring true to you. The storm of apparitions, and Vriska, in the middle, angry at you, makes your head spin. These are not terms you have to agree to, you’d thought when the terms were only Vriska’s recreation of a self she no longer was. 

Before you have time to wonder wonder what terms you’ve been accepting all this time without noticing them, darkness surrounds you again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the audio is, of course, cobalt thief from the [colours and mayhem album](https://homestuck.bandcamp.com/album/colours-and-mayhem-universe-a-b) with some ocean sounds slapped over it. 
> 
> a resounding thank you to all friends, readers, commenters, people who like posts on twitter when i complain about art, and sundry helpful figures!


	4. CHAPTER III: CASTLE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We are where we're from.

The darkness clears, and is replaced almost instantly with more darkness.

You are standing on a wide balcony overhanging several floors of black stone that in turn stand on the sharp drop-off of a cliff. 

All of it – the landscape, the sense of height and depth, the smooth-hewn dark stone beneath your feet – it could almost be Vriska’s hive. So when you turn around, it does not come as so much of a shock that it is there, towering above you with its blue lights and licorice towers. 

It is not quite the same. The space where Equius’s neighboring castle should have been is empty, and you can't smell the sea. There are no moons in the sky, and the stars are not stars that you’re familiar with. And on certain days during the light season, you recall that the sky above Vriska’s house would be rendered a rustblood-red, as if to remind the two of you what was held just one spiral staircase away, in the cliffs below. But here the sky remains a milky blue. Strange stars and nothing more.

Stars and emptiness. You are reminded of –

You don’t need to turn around to know she’s behind you, star-speckled and half-transparent. And the memory is there: your shared isolation, the chances she gave you, the chance you gave her. Early mornings in the forests of Earth C. Late nights in your Troll Kingdom apartment.

She’d texted you after you’d fucked off unceremoniously from Rose and Kanaya’s wedding midway through, followed you out of there before the trickster nonsense began. She’d always been able to share more than you about what she was thinking or feeling at any given moment, but whatever she’d felt about Rose-and-Kanaya the singular entity, you’d never managed to successfully find out. 

This is probably for the best. Every piece of knowledge Jade withheld from you, every scrap of knowledge you gave her, serve to make the gap between you a little bit narrower.

Jade’s voice is harsh when she speaks. Harsher than in memory.

JADE: so  
JADE: can i ask what you need?  
JADE: do you have an idea to bounce off of me maybe? or would that be too personal?  
TEREZI: 1 TH1NK TH4T  
TEREZI: 1F 1 4M 1M4G1N1NG J4D3  
TEREZI: 1 4M B31NG 4 B1T S3LF-CONGR4TUL4TORY BY 4SSUM1NG SH3 L1K3D M3 3NOUGH TO B3 TH1S 4NGRY 4T M3  
JADE: you mean to say.  
JADE: to demonstrate the artificiality of the situation you’re imagining, you’re going to address yourself, even when a convenient projection of me is standing RIGHT HERE?  
JADE: check it out, youve even made me transparent so that you dont have to pretend im a real person.  
JADE: i think thats really big of you.  
JADE: and im angry at you because you liked it when i was!  
JADE: you were more confused when i wasnt, because someone being angry at you made SENSE in the way someone forgiving you, or god forbid EXPECTING things from you, doesnt  
JADE: you don’t think anyone has the right to forgive you except for vriska  
JADE: and even then, you wouldn’t tell her you need her to  
JADE: and IF SHE DID, you wouldn’t believe her anyway.  
JADE: you’ve made a really nice little prison for yourself!  
JADE: thats what you like, prisons  
JADE: thats the only way you know how to exist.

Jade pauses for amoment, watching your hands as they tighten on the balcony.

JADE: its funny because i wouldnt say that  
JADE: i wouldnt say any of that.  
JADE: i try to maintain a proud reputation as the most low maintenance person in the grocery store!  
JADE: you dont know what id say!  
JADE: you just conjure up people you know youve let down in your head and let them dress you down.  
JADE: or you do now apparently  
JADE: maybe you werent bothering, before

The two of you stand on the balcony in silence for a long, long moment.

[TEREZI: 4 P4L3 1M1T4T1ON 1S B3TT3R TH4N LOSS.  
](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27583958)TEREZI: 1 TOLD YOU TH4T ONC3, R1GHT?  
JADE: yeah.  
JADE: what are you imitating now?  
TEREZI: 1M NOT –   
TEREZI: YOU 1NS1NU4T3 TH4T 1’M PUPP3T33R1NG YOU.  
TEREZI: TH4T 1SN’T HOW TH1S WORKS.  
JADE: i know!  
JADE: but still, youre wandering through space and conjuring up people to talk to.  
JADE: i would have killed for mind powers on that ship, or a dream bubble or two  
JADE: i would have killed for the ability to imagine  
JADE: i would have killed for the ability to create!  
JADE: all i can do is change and shift and move and MOVING UNIVERSES DOESN’T MATTER if you can’t make the things that matter to you.

TEREZI: NON3 OF TH1S 1S R34L  
TEREZI: 3V3N 4CC3SS1NG M3MOR13S TH4T R34LLY H4PP3N3D DO3SN’T M4K3 TH3M 1MP4CT MY R34L1TY  
TEREZI: 4S FOR TH1S?  
TEREZI: TH1S 1S MOR3 OR L3SS PL4Y1NG PR3T3ND.  
JADE: well  
JADE: i would hazard to guess the version of me that exists in your head still matters  
JADE: otherwise you wouldnt be thinking about me here.  
TEREZI: 1 DON’T KNOW 1F 1 CONTROL WH4T 1 TH1NK 4BOUT H3R3  
TEREZI: 1 DON’T KNOW 1F 1 CONTROL WH4T 1 R3M3MB3R!  
TEREZI: T4VROS, 4R4D14, WH4T W4S TH31R PR3S3NC3 M34NT TO T3LL M3?  
TEREZI: 4ND WH4T 4R3 YOU M34NT TO T3LL M3 H3R3?  
JADE: did it ever matter what i thought?  
JADE: thats a genuine question.  
JADE: has anything ive ever told you –  
JADE: has anything ANYONE has ever told you except for yourself  
JADE: ever changed your mind about anything?  
TEREZI: …  
TEREZI: TH3R3 MUST H4V3 B33N 4 T1M3.  
JADE: not with me.  
JADE: not on earth c.  
JADE: we are where we’re from.  
JADE: where im from is on an island alone trying to listen to anyone but myself  
JADE: and you?  
JADE: in a forest, alone!  
JADE: trying to make sure you’re the only person you’re listening to!  
JADE: trying to make sure nobody TELLS you something worth hearing!

Harsh.

She is right. She has always been right. For all of the perkiness that you’d generated around the new you – the you that spent hours lying on the floor listening to her mother, the you that texted Karkat and Sollux and Nepeta and cheerfully ignoring all the parts of you that ached with unhappiness.

Of course you would not have listened. Listening would not have _helped_. Advice is for people who think they are capable of altering the core of their selfhoods, advice is for people who think selfhood _means_ something.

Jade looks toward the castle. For the first time, you are noticing the faint music is playing from within. The sound of steps, moving to music.

JADE: we aren’t who we are. we are only where we’re from.  
JADE: you’re from a forest alone.  
JADE: you’re from over there, too.

Something apprehensive hammers in you. You cannot ask. But Jade has been listening to people _not ask_ all her life, hasn’t she? 

You know that you are exploiting something about her by default. You know that her desire, at all costs, not to be alone, is working to your benefit and against hers. This will be true regardless of what you could do to convince yourself otherwise. That accepting love is a way to hurt someone; that rejecting love is a way to hurt someone, too.

What you could do to prevent this is only to be the kind of person who deserves that kind of attention, that kind of desire, that kind of forgiveness. It is also a kind of person you can’t be. There are a lot of kinds of people you can’t be, including kinds of people that others have mistaken you for, kinds of people you’ve successfully pretended to be for years.

Jade gives you her arm.

You take it.

They are called dream bubbles for a reason, and so you do not notice the moment in which the clothes you’ve worn across half of Paradox Space suddenly vanish in favor of… well.

TEREZI: NOT TO PUT STOCK 1NTO 4 S3NS3 FOR UNCOOL 4ND UN1NT3R3ST1NG P3OPL3  
TEREZI: BUT HOW DO 1 LOOK?  
JADE: hm  
JADE: strangely dashing! :O

The room inside is not a room in Vriska’s old hive. Even if she’d had grand entry halls like this one before, it certainly would never have been set up like this. Blurs of color swirl around you. Dance music plays, something you don’t recognize.

You turn to Jade, ready to say something – anything – but she’s already disappeared into the crowd of swirling colors. And once more, you are letting the dream consume you more than you’d like. Because it doesn’t come as a surprise when, moments later, she is replaced by Rose Lalonde.

ROSE: Terezi.  
ROSE: I’ve been expecting you.  
TEREZI: …  
TEREZI: TH4T ON3 N33DS WORK  
ROSE: Trust me, if I had a semi-ironic swivel chair and a twisted desk hewn from evil mahogany, I would gladly have made use of it.

She is well-dressed. Put-together. Nothing about this is out of the ordinary, except that perhaps she has only grown more disarming since you started seeing her in outfits that didn’t essentially constitute a faceful of Orange Crush.

TEREZI: TH3R3 W4S N3V3R 4NYTH1NG L1K3 TH1S  
TEREZI: NOT 1N 4NY OF OUR M3MOR13S  
ROSE: Do you still think you are in the realms of life and memory alone?

She takes your hands; without saying a further word, she has pulled you to the dance floor, is moving the two of you around in steps you have no choice but to follow. She has the height advantage, after all, and the dreamscape ballroom dancing advantage you have never had a reason to pursue.

All you can do is move your own feet.

ROSE: Whatever collection of intrananarrative contrivances the Furthest Ring presents, you have vacated that space. A story is built on speculation, not memory.  
ROSE: You should know that. You’ve remembered things that have not happened.  
ROSE: How is this any different?  
TEREZI: NOT D1FF3R3NT.  
TEREZI: BUT FORG1V3 M3 1F TR4V3RS1NG MY OWN FUCK3D UP F4NT4SY WORLD W1TH NO S3NS3 OF 1TS RUL3S OR L1M1T4T1ONS 1S MOD3R4T3LY D1SOR13NT1NG!  
TEREZI: W3 C4N’T 4LL B3 L1GHT PL4Y3RS >:[  
ROSE: No.  
ROSE: Thankfully not.

There is a moment in which it is only your feet, knowing the right place to step as if you have done this already in another world, with someone else or with Rose herself. It would almost almost tempting to forget the conversation; forget all that is at stake.

Before you can pull yourself out of the moment of blissful silence – silence, that is, but for the music – Rose speaks herself.

ROSE: Unusual, incidentally, for you to admit to feeling out of your depth.  
ROSE: I would almost say unique.  
TEREZI: HM  
TEREZI: UH  
TEREZI: YOU’V3 F41L3D TO CONS1D3R TH4T

You are realizing now that you cannot stop, that you have not been thinking about the steps of the dance; you have not been choosing to move, but being, rather, swept around by a will that is not your own. The exhaustion of constant movement, of constant evaluation, hits you all at once. And still the dance goes on.

TEREZI: TH4T YOU’V3 M4D3 4 PO1NT.

Rose shakes her head. She does not need to take pleasure in the upper hand. She does not need to tell you she has it. All this passes between you, unspoken, only with a slightly tightened grip of her hand.

ROSE: You can’t seem to make up your mind.  
ROSE: Do you want this place you’ve crossed into to tell you the secrets of whatever it is that’s unresolved in you?  
TEREZI: TH3R3 1S NOTH1NG UNR3SOLV3D –  
ROSE: Terezi.  
ROSE: We know _that’s_ not true.  
ROSE: There is something unknown, something incomprehensible in each of us, inaccessible to those around us.  
ROSE: You know that better than anyone.  
TEREZI: BUT NOT TO OURS3LV3S.  
TEREZI: YOU KNOW *TH4T* B3TT3R TH4N 4NYON3.  
ROSE: Do I?  
ROSE: I know I have presumed to believe so at times.

She uses several inches of height above you to her advantage, and spins you around. 

ROSE: The truth is?  
ROSE: If we are comprehensible, I hope that one day, some version of me realizes the parts that are comprehensible to others are not to be dismissed.  
ROSE: And that love of us on the part of another is not a sign of failed comprehension.  
ROSE: This is, of course, a difficult thing to believe.  
TEREZI: 1’M NOT SUR3 TH1S H4S 4NYTH1NG TO DO W1TH M3.  
ROSE: You’ve caught me.  
ROSE: Perhaps I monologue about that which pertains to me, letting my audience believe – if they choose – that I’m providing incisive insight into their psyches.  
ROSE: Then again, I think at least some of what I have said holds some relevance for you.  
TEREZI:  
TEREZI: 1 4M PL34D1NG YOUR HUM4N F1FTH  
TEREZI: YOU LOOK F4R TOO PL34S3D W1TH YOURS3LF 4LR34DY!

The dance ends as you speak, and you force these admittedly fetching red boots to stay on the ground, to assert yourself against whatever night’s story the dream bubble has foisted upon you.

TEREZI: TH4T W4S 4 V3RY CH4RM1NG G4M3 OF FL4RP  
TEREZI: C4N W3 L34V3 NOW?

The dancing shades surrounding you are unnerving you. You do not like the way you cannot see their faces well, as if they are discouraging you from looking at them. You do not like the arbitrariness of their presence.

ROSE: I believe I know a place.

You have never properly known how to say no to following a Light player.

She leads you through the room; the crowd parts for her. A pair of doors twice your heights is pushed open and then slams behind you, and then the two of you are facing a long hallway lined with windows.

She keeps walking for a few paces, giving you enough time to realize that the light streaming in from outside smells far too bright for Alternia (or else not bright enough for Alternia, as you and only you have lived to relay). 

In front of a window, you stop, pulling her to a stop in front of you. 

There is no more darkness, only some of the clearest light you’ve ever smelled. When you briefly press your tongue against the glass, the void from earlier is gone. Impossible whiteness, instead. Earth snow.

Rose is framed in the light when you turn back to her.

ROSE: I have envied you, you know.  
ROSE: I have thought: to do what Vriska and Terezi have done to each other and to love each other all the same. How terrifying an act.  
ROSE: How uncomplicated.  
ROSE: It is a far less complicated thing to know what someone is capable of than to _not_ know.  
TEREZI: 1 TH1NK YOU’R3 UND3RS3LL1NG TH3 D1FF1CULTY OF L1V1NG W1TH H4V1NG MORT4LLY WOUND3D YOUR B3ST FR13ND  
ROSE: Of course.  
ROSE: But fifteen-year-olds are not known for their unbiased understandings of others, or of themselves.  
ROSE: Thankfully, we grow out of it.

A moment of silence.

TEREZI: OUTS1D3  
TEREZI: TH3 34RTH SNOW SC3N3  
TEREZI: 1 TH1NK 1 R3M3MB3R.

An afternoon on the meteor, given by the entry point of a dream bubble.

You and Vriska had figured out the Earth institution of the snowball fight quite easily. Rose and Kanaya had been equally had tremendously, frighteningly good aim; Vriska had exploited Light powers to her heart’s content. You’d targeted Dave and Rose disproportionately, their vivid uniforms giving you an advantage you would not have otherwise had. 

If Rose had seemed reticent in the aftermath, you’d barely noticed, or at least barely filed it away as relevant information. If Rose had wanted to be anywhere else, or if she’d missed home terribly, or both, you had not bothered to look.

It make sense that you’d missed lots, back then. Too busy noticing Vriska – always noticing Vriska, and still not noticing enough. Still not noticing enough to have any clue where she’s leading you now.

Still, it had been a nice afternoon. And yet you are positive that facsimile is not what Rose herself is remembering.

TEREZI: TH1S 1S YOUR HUM4N H1V3, 1SN’T 1T?

She smiles at you. Tilts her head.

ROSE: Are we not where we’re from?

You have enough of a sense of dramatic timing this time to say –

TEREZI: DON’T GO!

But the stupid, stupid request comes late even as you say it. 

Alone again, and suddenly immensely tired.You shouldn’t be this tired. You have only walked – 

You have only, really, walked quite far. 

If the manifestations of Tavros and Aradia could make you believe they were Vriska’s way of sending some kind of poorly conceived argument your way, you have no way to explain these unfairly well-dressed memory-echoes of Jade and Rose.

You lean against the wall, and find yourself all too tempted to slide down to the floor.

Whatever’s outside the castle, this is Vriska’s place, all right. Rough, black, unforgiving stone. She’d used to scatter your costumes and FLARP manuals all over the room, much to Kanaya’s later dismay. And _you_ used to be pretty sure that it was to hide the core being of where she lived. A place cold and dark and blood-splattered. A black castle full of empty rooms.

We are where we’re from. We are where we’re from.

You close your eyes, but this does very little. 

The two of you used to spread blankets across the stone floor when you slept over – an enterprise that each of you treated with trepidation, for different reasons. It had taken quite a few layers to even begin concealing the hardness of the floor, but it had been the kind of thing you knew not to bring up. Some words were the sorts of words that could not be unremembered, or disconnected from their contexts. 

Because _there is nothing you can do to this home to make it liveable, nothing to make it soft, nothing to make it pretty_ could not have ever been a thing you believed, let alone a thing you said. Even with everything you did to her afterward, you could never have done that.

Had this hallway always been here? Had the two of you ran across it once, in a dead world in another time and place, her hand clutched in yours?

Your fist clenches.

All the way back then, why hadn’t you helped her?

You’d _thought_ you were helping her.

Why hadn’t you helped her in the _right ways?_

You think you lose track of time. You might have even almost drifted off to sleep at a certain point, head swimming with memory of this place now that the silly ballroom was gone. It could almost have been FLARP. You could almost have been wearing a Redglare costume. 

It’s only when you hear footsteps beside you that you tear yourself away from the act of remembering. A familiar hand reaches down to help you up, which you politely ignore, pulling yourself up by the windowsill.

????: hi, terezi!

A familiar face; a familiar voice. But not the face you’ve pictured while engaged in the game of ignoring texts.

TEREZI: >:!  
TEREZI: H1 J –  
TEREZI:  
TEREZI: YOU T3LL M3?  
JUNE: i’m june! >:)  
JUNE: that’s not a prank, even though i am making my eye brows pointy like you do. i am simply happy to have surprised you.  
TEREZI: 1 W4S NOT SUGG3ST1NG 4 PR4NK!  
TEREZI: 1 DON’T KNOW HOW TH1S S3TT1NG WORKS OR WHO TH3 FUCK 1S 1M4G1N1NG 4LL TH1S  
TEREZI: BUT GOOD FOR YOU?  
TEREZI: TH3 SU1T 1S 4 GOOD CHO1C3  
TEREZI: VR1SK4 WOULD B3 PL34S3D  
JUNE: holy shit.  
JUNE: i can’t believe this.  
JUNE: i tricked you into being NICE to me! the prankster’s gambit is mine to keep now.  
JUNE: and all i had to do was trans my entire gender.  
JUNE: if i’d known this years erlier every thing would have been so much easier.  
TEREZI: Y34H TH4T’S K1ND OF HOW 1T WORKS  
TEREZI: 1N G3N3R4L NOT JUST 1N T3RMS OF 4NT4GON1Z1NG M3  
JUNE: well.  
JUNE: YOU try knowing anything about your self with, like, all this.

She gestures expansively around herself; then, as if to maximize the effect, 

JUNE: every thing that the light touches is – that’s dumb, actually, forget that.  
JUNE: but yeah.  
JUNE: this is where i grew up.

The scene outside the window has changed again. A blue sky; bright green below. Rows and rose of identical white human hives, multiplied as far ahead as you can smell them until they fade into the haze of distance.

She sees you examining them.

JUNE: i don’t know how far they went on, really.  
JUNE: maybe they stopped!  
JUNE: maybe i did not actually live in one white square house in the middle of a hundred million white square houses with nothing else for miles around. you know, jury’s out!  
JUNE: fucked up how we can’t remember that kind of thing.  
JUNE: but that’s what child hood is, for me, i guess.  
JUNE: you grow up in this kind of house and then you move into one, and you start doing your shopping at the dadly depot and acquire your own aura of fatherly confidence, and, like –   
JUNE: has anyone ever told you, terezi...  
JUNE: it is a really fucked up secret.  
JUNE: you have to promise not to tell!

You smell bullshit. 

You are, however, feeling slightly indulgent.

TEREZI: 1 W1LL NOT T3LL 4NYON3 YOUR SUR3LY V3RY R34L 4ND S3R1OUS S3CR3T.

June’s voice drops down to a whisper.

JUNE: we live........  
JUNE: in a society.  
TEREZI: D4MN  
TEREZI: TH4T’S CR4ZY

There is a long moment in which the two of you look out the window. You’d pesterlog-messaged a version of her, once; a version living in one of the very houses the two of you look out on now.

And you think of June on Earth C, stuck in the same house from before relocated to a sunny planet with green grass and a blue sky, not so different from a forever-state of this place in front of you, a place where nothing happens, a place you have come here to escape.

What will you reshape around yourself if you come back?

You look down at where your hands grip black stone, and you think, _and what about Vriska?_

June’s voice startles you.

JUNE: tell me you got the reference.  
JUNE: i wasn’t just telling you out of nowhere that we lived in a s–  
TEREZI: JUN3  
TEREZI: 1 L1V3D ON 4 PL4N3T W1TH 31GHT D3V4ST4T1NGLY ONL1N3 HUM4N CH1LDR3N FOR H4LF 4 SW33P  
JUNE: oh.  
JUNE: yes, that makes sense.  
TEREZI: 4LSO W3 H4D TH4T M3M3 ON 4LT3RN14  
JUNE: no way.  
JUNE: you had the joker on alternia?

TEREZI: W3 H4D 4N 3NT1R3 SH1TTY F4C3T OF CULTUR3 D3D1C4T3D TO CLOWNS  
TEREZI: 4LSO  
JUNE: we get it! i am dumb and not from your planet.  
JUNE: get new material… loser!

You hadn’t even known what, precisely, you were going to say next. You’ve been relying far too much on a suddenly faulty improvisational skill, lately.

Black rock beneath your hands, and identical houses beyond the window. The words slip out before you’ve thought them through, 

TEREZI: 1 KNOW W3’R3 WH3R3 W3’R3 FROM JUN3  
TEREZI: TH3 4NSW3R 1S WH3TH3R W3 C4N 3V3R FUCK1NG *STOP*  
JUNE: lmao  
JUNE: no.  
JUNE: but we can change, i guess! or something.  
JUNE: if you wanted inspiring you should have gone to rose.  
TEREZI: ROS3 1S 1NSP1R1NG?  
JUNE: i think she’s inspiring!  
JUNE: she is my friend and i like her.

You can’t argue with that logic!

It is strange to know that the two of them and Dave and Jade were friends for years before you even knew either of them. A layer of understanding buried far down in the formation of their selves, the sort of thing almost nobody can really ever catch up on. 

You have this with precisely one person, and the thought makes you feel desperately lonely, which is just… embarassing, but not more embarrassing than everything else to have happened here.

TEREZI: 1 SHOULD GO.  
TEREZI: VR1SK4 1S…  
TEREZI: OUT H3R3 SOM3WH3R3, 1 TH1NK?  
JUNE: it would be super fucked up if you wasted too much time in a place where time might not even exist, yes.  
TEREZI: 1 –

How are you supposed to tell her that the thought of her disappearing while you’re still speaking to her, and knowing that, from her most of all, you _deserve it_ , is stupidly unsettling?

You’re not.

TEREZI: 4ND Y3T YOU S41D ‘M1GHT’.  
TEREZI: CUR1OUS!  
TEREZI: ON3 MUST NOT TR34T TH31R HYPOTH3S3S 4S F4CT, JUN3.  
TEREZI: 1 THOUGHT YOU W3R3 4N 3CTOB1OLOG1ST! >:]  
JUNE: there was indeed a time where i could have claimed to fit that description.  
JUNE: good luck, terezi.

She fades before you can turn around, and so you turn around anyway; swing yourself on your heel and walk resolutely down the hallway.

The corridor ends too abruptly; all of a sudden, the floor drops out beneath itself. You are quietly relieved that you have been using your cane.

Holding it more tightly than feels normal, you feel in front of you to reveal a steep staircase, and dread rises in you before you’ve managed to connect the sharp angle of the stair’s height with the feeling of stepping on them, of standing atop that incline. 

If _she’s_ down there –

You’re descending the staircase, almost faster than June or her silly ectomother or someone else with deeply _human_ sensibilities would tell you is safe. Halfway down, breathing fast, you pause to wonder if a memory-Dave will do the courtesy of appearing to warn you about stairs, but the way down remains empty. Apparently tonight’s walk through your human fascinations was a girls-only event. 

Dave was probably invited to the other ghost party, the one that involved a warm more-than-friend, and relative solitude, and a nice movie, and nothing unnecessarily cryptic happening at all.

These days it seems like the kind of thing that would happen to him.

The end of the staircase hits you by surprise, and you almost stumble on the stone passageway.

A tall figure, not so different as she was the last time you met here here, but wrapped in what must be an adult version of her FLARP costume – it smells like cerulean and comes down to below her knees. There is darkness behind her, but – your pusher begins to slow down – nothing else.

VRISKA: Look on my works, ye mighty, and desp8ir.  
VRISKA: Troll Percy Shelley said that.  
TEREZI: 1S TROLL P3RCY SH3LL3Y 4 R34L TH1NG OR D1D ROS3 L4LOND3 QUOT3 TH4T 4T US 3V3RY T1M3 SH3, L1K3, M4D3 SOM3TH1NG D1SGUST1NG W1TH TH3 ALCH3M1T3R  
VRISKA: How quickly my surprise factor f8des!!!!!!!!  
VRISKA: No ‘8oo hoo holy shit that’s 8rain ghost Vriska’ this time around, huh?  
TEREZI: BY YOUR WORKS D1D YOU M34N –  
VRISKA: Is this question hour or something?!  
VRISKA: Don’t you have time to say hello to an old and potentially-dead friend?

You know your face shows how stricken you are; you know you should not be angry about this. _It’s her_ , you try to tell yourself. _It’s her, it’s Vriska_. The memory of the meteor, of being able to speak something like _truth_ to her, even edited, spins around you, just out of reach. There is only her, and Mindfang’s coat, and the empty pit behind her. 

It should not be empty. You are more thankful than you’ve ever been for anything that it is.

TEREZI: PL34S3 JUST T3LL M3.  
TEREZI: WH4T 4R3 YOU TRY1NG TO T3LL M3?  
TEREZI: WH4T 4R3 YOU TRY1NG TO T34CH M3?

Vriska laughs. It’s not a nice laugh.

TEREZI: 1 4LR34DY KNOW  
TEREZI: 1 KNOW TH3 WORST OF WH4T YOU’V3 DON3 4ND WH4T 1’V3 DON3 4ND WH4T W3 D1D TOG3TH3R, WH1CH W4S 4 LOT OF 1T  
TEREZI: 1 KNOW WH4T H4PP3N3D W1TH T4VROS 4ND 4R4D14 B3C4US3 1 W4S FUCK1NG TH3R3!  
TEREZI: 1 KNOW WH4T H4PP3N3D 1N TH1S ROOM  
TEREZI: 1 KNOW TH3 B1GG3R TH1NGS 1 COULDN’T S33 TH3N!

VRISKA: Wow. Wow!!!!!!!!  
VRISKA: Well, if you’re so fucking sm8rt, why do I need to answer 8ny questions at all!  
VRISKA: God damn, I was going to give you some funny little arc w8rds or s8mething but I guess we’re just fine!!  
VRISKA: Look 8round here 8nd tell me th8t we’re not where we’re F8CKING fr–

TEREZI: 1 KNOW!!!

There is so much _noise_ inside your _fucking_ head.

TEREZI: 1 KNOW. 1 KNOW. 1 KNOW.  
TEREZI: W3 4R3N’T WHO W3 4R3 W3 4R3 ONLY WH3R3 W3’R3 FROM  
TEREZI: 1 L1K3 TO TH1NK 1 C4N ST1LL F1X MYS3LF  
TEREZI: 1 4M OUT H3R3 B3C4US3 1 4M TRY1NG, SO H4RD, TO ST1LL F1X MYS3LF  
TEREZI: 4ND 1 4M TRY1NG TO S4V3 YOU B3C4US3 YOU 4R3 YOU 4ND YOU 4R3 1N 3V3R1TH1NG OF M1N3 TH4T H4S 3V3R B33N WORTH 4NYTH1NG  
TEREZI: 4ND 4LSO B3C4US3 YOU 4R3 YOURS3LF,  
VRISKA: And 8ecause you’ve had the GR8IOUSNESS to decl8re me worthy!  
VRISKA: You’ve w8ighed my S8UL and decided I’ve redeemed mys8lf!  
VRISKA: Don’t even PRETEND that this isn’t what this is all about!!!!!!!!  
VRISKA: You T8LD Tavros EX8CTLY TH4T!  
VRISKA: And th8t’s re8lly fucking fl8ttering, but it’s kind of hil8rious that you’d pull me 8ut of the one and 8NLY thing I had going for myself 8efore retiring to a s8d little existence on Earth C.  
VRISKA: And THEN you think you h8ve the r8ght to compl8in when the w8y there is a little _DIFFIC8ULT_!!!!!!!!

You have never lost your cool like this. You have never - you should never have - this conversation should not be happening, not here, not like this –

Deep breaths. Closed eyes, to recreate the feeling of a time when closed eyes did anything for you. (Once, only sweeps ago, when things got to be too much, you’d pressed yourself into Vriska and tried to make her sea-scent, blue and stars and creaks of ships and cutlasses and the sea and the blue and the sea, the only thing you could smell.) You had been willing to dissolve into that ocean. You had been willing –

You open your eyes. 

TEREZI: 1 JUST W4NT US TO GO HOM3.

Hah! Imagine.

You wouldn’t say that.

TEREZI: JUST T3LL M3 WH4T YOU W4NT M3 TO H34R, T3LL M3 WH4T 1 N33D TO CH4NG3 4ND 1’LL CH4NG3 1T.

Nor that.

TEREZI: 1’M SORRY.  
TEREZI: 1’M SORRY!  
TEREZI: PL34S3 COM3 B4CK.  
TEREZI: 1 N33D YOU.

VRISKA: …  
VRISKA: You need me.

She would not say this.

You would not say this.

YOUR VR1SK4 VO1C3 1S OFF, DUMB4SS!!!

NON3 OF TH1S H4S H4PP3N3D.

NON3 OF TH1S _COULD_ H4PP3N!!!!

SO SHUT *UP*!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Vriska of something approaching reality watches you levelly. 

And you are silent.

VRISKA: Nothing to say, huh?  
TEREZI: 4… 4 LOT, 4CTU4LLY.  
TEREZI: JUST – 1’M JUST –

Something shifts in her stance. Like there’s something she’s remembering.

VRISKA: Tell me later!  
VRISKA: I DO 8elieve in you, you know.  
VRISKA: I just think we’re going somewhere interesting, you and I and this cast of memories. ::::)  
VRISKA: Try to have fun with it.

She moves to clap you on the shoulder, and as she does, her pirate coat falls open just a little, and you smell unmistakeable white.

She’s smiling at you, too. She has never bounced back like this in real life; not with you, at least, not as well as you think she’s doing it now. Or is there a crack in her smile that you’ve just failed to notice? You are afraid – have always been afraid, suddenly – that you have lost sight of her altogether, lost all sense of who “Vriska Serket” is aside from a concept you’ve made in your head, held together with hope and memory.

TEREZI: VR1SK4 –

Before Vriska can watch as improvisation fails you again, you are alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the imbedded music is a section from johann strauss's "rosen aus dem süden", because i think i am really funny.
> 
> much thanks to all of the usual people who deserve thanks (see chapter two), but particularly to rads for aiding me in saving this bad boy's work skin after ao3 UNCEREMONIOUSLY destroyed that shit
> 
> next update..... one day! by the end of april, hopefully, and soon after that if not then! thank you for reading, and i'm [chronotopics](https://twitter.com/chronotopics) on twitter, as per usual!


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